Comments on: R.I.P. FreeHand

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 22:23:24 +0000

Please, I beg you, make FreeHand reincarnate!!!

By: freitag

freitag — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 13:51:06 +0000

freehand is the better tool. for drawing and working quick its faster and so also money saver. my illustrator collegs earn not that much like me and this is also a reason. the time i need to finish somehting, they are still drawing, because you cannot easy click thru objects, past inside, select just what you click and not the hidden crap around. thats such a pain, this programm.

i am still draw in freehand till the day is really coming and i have to switch. i hope till then also canvas, xara, corel, inscape, microsoft design have migration guides. f. adobe for this

By: Hugh

Hugh — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 16:24:37 +0000

This post and comments seems to becoming important to former Freehand users… so I’ll add that Illustrator has supported multiple pages for a while, just not very well.

http://www.sketchpad.net/multipage.htm

If you need bleed on your pages, increase the page size to account for that.

By: Sean Lai

Sean Lai — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 08:44:32 +0000

Well… RIP FreeHand. Now for the switch to iLLustrator. The reason that kept me from switching to iLLustrator was that FreeHand had multi page. This keeps the number of files down. Sad to see my beloved application and MULTI PAGE go!!! I have been using it since 3.1 (in school). And have used it to create Ads, illustrations and everything else under the sun!!.

R.I.P FreeHand you will be missed

By: Jason Holmberg

Jason Holmberg — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 17:29:30 +0000

FreeHand MX is still so much more useful than Illustrator CS3! FreeHand: faster, intuitive, small file sizes. I can still do things in FreeHand MX that I would not dare do in Illustrator CS3.

For example, create far more complex documents with multiple pages, tiled fills all over, master pages (huge timesaver), more complex find and replace criteria, can open, save, and print with lightning speed (Illustrator would still be starting up!).

I find comparisons between FreeHand and Illustrator a little perplexing as FreeHand is in it’s own category. It does what Illustrator does, plus. I think Illustrator would not benefit by taking on FreeHand characteristic, it would simply become even more bloated. Adobe has become a marketing machine intent on satisfying it’s stock holders and it’s bottom line. Let’s sell two programs (InDesign and Illustrator CS3) to do what FreeHand did all alone. Will someone please buy (rescue) the code from Adobe so FreeHand users can get back to work using a fast, smart tool that runs circles around Adobe bloatware.

By: Bob Sander-Cederlof

Bob Sander-Cederlof — Mon, 28 May 2007 03:36:07 +0000

After working longer than any other programmer on FreeHand (14 years), I really do miss it. I still use FreeHand, but I hate the fact that it is running under Rosetta, and that a few features don’t work in that environment. Point of history: we used OOPS from version 3 to 8, and then switched to C++. In my opinion, the best versions were 3, 8, and 11.02 (MX). The most fun features I contributed were the arithmetic expressions in numeric fields (mentioned by Lorin above), and transparency. Another point of history: we skipped version 6, going directly from 5.5 to 7. We never knew exactly why…

By: matthew

matthew — Thu, 24 May 2007 13:03:24 +0000

IMHO Freehand was always much better than Illustrator - easier to use, more useful features being just some of the things I liked about it.
Confusing UI quirks and unnecessary alerts being things I still dont like about Illustrator.

RIP.

By: Lorin Rivers

Lorin Rivers — Wed, 23 May 2007 22:13:40 +0000

@Daniel Pasco: the NeXT app you refer to was Altsys Virtuoso

FreeHand is one of the apps that was intimately involved with (first as Virtuoso, then as part of the FreeHand team) while at Altsys. I miss FreeHand EVERY time I use Illustrator (which is a great program, just doesn’t work like FreeHand). And since I had some influence on how FreeHand works, it works how I think these things SHOULD work.

One HUGE difference between the two is FreeHand’s superior math as applied to path modification and point placement. To see what I mean, zoom way in on a path and click to add a point. FreeHand puts the point where you click while Illustrator puts the point NEAR where you click.

That and the easy access to positioning elements/points via a dialog using MATH (don’t know if this works in Illustrator). In FreeHand, you can put “/2″ after some value, hit enter, and lo, it’s half as wide (or what have you).

Alas.

The Altsys team was top-notch (Hi, Matt!) and I miss them.

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 23 May 2007 11:35:14 +0000

Yesterday, while bravely deciding to start a new character design in Illustrator, I discovered for the first time that they have no satisfactory duplicate for the Paste-Inside function in FreeHand. No really. This allows me to do SO MUCH quick and useful stuff when illustrating… I actually can’t fathom that Adobe has never implemented this feature..(and please don’t tell me about masks - they don’t come close) I feel like crying.

From learning FreeHand in college at version 6, it just seemed such a logical system to from the beginning. Sure there were plenty annoying typically-Macromedia-overlooked items (like defaulting to user/documents for File>Open EVERY time), but precise and controlled drawing was never better.

Multi-page support is a BIG deal when you’ve got it. The entire South African design+ad industry used Freehand almost exclusively for publishing - only reverting to Quark/InDesign on very large page-counts. It was just easier to use.

Illustrator kills it on colour reproduction and display - but I still feel that everywhere else FreeHand still wins.

Very sad.

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 23 May 2007 02:04:27 +0000

Why I’m crying over the thought of moving to illustrator:
- you can only have one page per file
- it uses a lot more memory
- it’s has much slower rendering (on my PowerBook at least - not sure about a Rosetta Freehand vs Intel Illustrator)

Are there any other applications that can handle multiple pages like Freehand can?