A great town to be with children. Great outdoors - Peak District National Park is right here - good choice of primary

schools, good sports facilities, good access to Manchester (30 mins every half an hour on the train) and well kept

parks with playgrounds (Manor Park and Howard Park).

Check out the noticeboard in the children’s area of the library for places to go with toddlers and under 5’s. Usually

kept up to date. Health Visitors can also provide a list of toddler groups.

Whatever anyone tells you, Glossop swimming pool is cold. You might be able to stick it with small children, but not

me. Certainly not under 3’s. Alternatives are in Romiley - nice, warm training pool, and the Copley Centre in

Stalybridge - also a warm training pool and impressive new changing facilities (July 2009).

Xara - www.xara.com - just the best all-round graphics program there is. It began life as ArtWorks on Acorn

computers and was brilliant then too. I’m not one to gush about such things, but I use Xara every day for personal

and professional work. I am not an artist but I can draw after a fashion, and use it for all my commercial work. Do

look at Xara’s website to see what it’s really capable of.

Since the inclusion of a spell checker I have used it exclusively for DTP. Previously I would import text that I had

written in another application, just to be sure.

Best things about it: super-fast vector drawing; web features - I use it for creating flash animations; multi-page

documents and all other DTP features. I probably only use about 30% of Xara’s features. I’d recommend it to

anyone. And it doesn’t cost the earth - and you don’t need a super computer to run it on.

Swish - or Swish Max2 as it is currently. Intelligently designed Flash authoring software.

Fast to learn, powerful, reasonably priced, lean (not bloatware). Good for designers and programmers alike. Current

version (July 2009) is based around ActionScript 2 scripting language.

Great for people like me who are happiest with a mixture of the visual and scripted way of creating multimedia

applications - and for people with small children who have to work in short bursts and have an imposed short

attention span! In learning Swish (and getting back into programming after a break of almost 7 years) it has been

easy to lean more towards the OOP approach.

I am finding it quick and easy to learn. Other authoring tools I’ve used are Authorware, Director, Visual Basic and

Flash MX.

Some recent work: www.shinylearning.co.uk/freegames.