According to its publishers in Australia, FX Draw 3 "could have been written by a teacher."

I have used FX Draw (Versions 1 and 2) for many years as a means of creating diagrams for school examinations papers and for diagrams on MathsNet. See here for a review of FX Draw 2. FX Draw 3 is one of a group of programs from efofex, called FXMathPack that also includes FX Graph, FX Equation and FX Stats. You can buy single and site licences from efofex or you can subscribe yearly.

The previous review described what FX Draw is essentially about. This review will concentrate on what is new in version 3. The writers have clearly tried to make big advances with this version. Virtually every aspect of version 2 has been enhanced or significantly developed, always with the harrassed and overworked mathematics teacher in mind.

Toolbars and buttons have been redesigned, so that now there are at least 20 more options than before. One clear advance is in what they call "advanced GAD" (geometrically aware drawing). The help guide that accompanies the software is essential reading here. The development of GAD brings FX Draw very close to fully fledged interactive geometry programs such as Cabri or Geometer's Sketchpad, not with anywhere near the sophisticated options of those programs but instead an immediacy and appeal to us working teachers, whereby we can get a useful working diagram produced quickly for print, or, more importantly for Interactive whiteboard use. A excellent example of this is how quickly you can produce a diagram suitable for investigating "Is it true that the area of a regular n-sided polygon on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the areas of the regular n-sided polygons on the other two sides?"

Two clicks on a new option will bring up an interactive illustration of the definitions of sin cos and tan.

I expect many teachers have spent precious time trying and failing to draw a tree diagram in Word or Excel or a drawing package. Now you can do it in a few clicks!

A new compass tool lets you draw arcs just as you would in a geometrical construction with "real" compasses. This example shows the bisection of an angle.

There is a whole host of buttons for drawing different types of lines, arcs, circles and polygons. Add to this "advanced GAD" and you have almost complete control over your diagrams with the ability to adjust them whilst maintaining geometric connections. You can mark angles with an arc or display the actual size of the angle. With any diagram you can display various measurement or add others from a list provided, such as line length, area, perimeter, angle size. The trig diagram above shows such a display. It will update automatically as you alter the diagram. You can paint formats from one kind of line to another, alter the units used in measurements, zoom in and out and shade any regions. This last addition will be particularly useful on an interactive whiteboard. You can export your diagrams to gif or bitmap format.

Fx Draw 3 is free to download for a 30 day trial period. Version 1 was good, version 2 was better. Because of the ease of access provided by the internet, it is easy for you to stop reading this review, download version 3 and try it out yourself. Do read through the help guides accompanying it. This is therefore a short review. FX Draw is an excellent package, aimed at teachers not academics, practitioners, not theorisers. And, what's more, the writers in Australia are very receptive to ideas and feedback, so you'll probably find your download version is a number far higher than 3.007.