I've got CT-art 4 and I'm very happy with it.
The appearance of the board and chess pieces can be changed (12 themes for the pieces and 4 for the board) with a right clic on the board.
You can also sort the problems by difficulty.
Here is a screenshot :http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/15/ctart4.jpg/
Moreover, once you've installed the program, you don't need the CD to run it. I bought it with friends, so the cost was reduced and we all enjoy the program :D
Hope it helped.
I've got CT-art 4 and I'm very happy with it.
The appearance of the board and chess pieces can be changed (12 themes for the pieces and 4 for the board) with a right clic on the board.
You can also sort the problems by difficulty.
Here is a screenshot :http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/15/ctart4.jpg/
Moreover, once you've installed the program, you don't need the CD to run it. I bought it with friends, so the cost was reduced and we all enjoy the program :D
Hope it helped.
It did help, and I looked at your screen shot. Much better pieces! Thank you. My program only has two themes, and both are, as I said, not to my liking.
I have CT-Art 4, and I like it, but it's definitely not a beginners tactics program. I would say the min. ELO rating on the puzzles is around 1600. I also got a program from them (also works through peshka) called Elementary Chess Combinations (also titled CT-Art for Beginners) which covers A LOT of single motif puzzles to help drill fundamentals. The ELO range is between 1000 and around 1600, so it's a good place to start if you're not ready for CT-Art 4.
I'll echo that. I bought CT-Art 4 yesterday and was surprised by the difficulty of some of the problems. Anyone used to the tactics trainer here or at chesstempo.com is in for a rude awakening 
One thing I don't like is the hint system (which as far as I can tell there's no way to disable). If you get a problem wrong, the program highlights the pieces/squares of interest, which is too much like cheating in my opinion, I would prefer the oppurtunity to have as long as I like to work it out myself
I have both CT-Art 3.0 and 4.0...I like the interface of 3.0 much better. Let me say that I despise Peshka...why Convekta changed a winning formula, I have no idea.
When I asked one of my students (he was about 1750 USCF at the time) to get CT-Art, I told him to get 3.0, even though 4.0 has about 1,000 more problems. I'm not saying one should do de la Maza's seven circles (I'm also not saying one shouldn't do it), but I went through CT-Art 3.0 about two times (1,200 problems on the CD, I did a little over 2,000) and it was tremendously helpful.
Doing crazy tactics drilling (40-100 tactics a day for about 4 months) with Chess Combinations Encyclopedia and CT-Art 3.0 was one of the biggest reasons I was able to raise my USCF rating from 1850 in March 2008, to 2000 in December 2008.
I have Chess Tactics For Beginners, a software training program from Convekta.
Two things I don't like.
1. The board and chess pieces are a throw back to the stone ages of computer chess with only two choices. Just plain ugly.
2. I need to log in as the administrator, otherwise, the program will not load.
Can I learn from this product? Yes.
Question: I've heard of members here using CT-ART 3.0/4.0 for tactics training.
Are you happy with the appearance of the board and chess pieces? Are there any glitches to be aware of?
Someone at chesscafe is not at all happy with CT-ART 4.0, and likes CT-ART 3.0 much better.
"As I said, one of the most useful features of CT-ART
3.0 was that you could work your way through the entire database sorted only
by degree of difficulty. This meant that you never had a clue what particular
type of tactic a particular position demanded. This is the best way to train, of
course. You don't get hints over the board, after all. So why did Convekta take
this away?"
Is this correct? Can you only train by tactical theme, and not with a random set of tactical problems?
At chesstempo, I can train both ways, and I like that possibility, especially when my statistics show that I have a huge weakness in certain tactical motiffs. I can then just load a problem set with those themes I am weakest at and work just on those.
From my stats, it shows that my three weakest areas are Desperado, Overloading
and Zugzwang. I think a desperado is when you crash one of your pawns, or maybe a piece into the enemy camp in a last ditch effort to inflict some damage in hopes of keeping the game alive. A zugzwang, I think, means that you are basically screwed, that no move you can make is a good one, but only a bad one. Overloading is when a piece is working overtime and not getting paid, something like that. More study is obviously required on these tactical motiffs.
Example of a stat read out from chesstempo. It keeps track of tons of information. This is just the spreadsheet. There are also graphs and other things.