killillust said:
This is the thing that concerns me the most about the Adobe takeover.
Lots of people still use Freehand, all my old professors and my former bosses still use it. Without Freehand, and if im forced to learn Illustrator, well i might as well just retire from graphic design now and learn a new trade. I work in a design firm of 4 and im the only one who uses Freehand but i pretty much run circles around all the other artist and there's nothing i cant do with Freehand and PS that others can do in Illustrator. i'm just able to do them in half the time. The FH tools are just so damn simple to use and make sense. Illustrator on the other hand, well.. lets just say I could go on and on about the many flaws of the usability of Illustrator. and for everyone who thinks Freehand lacks features such as filters, ect.. well that's what Photoshop is for. And that's what also makes Freehand a true vector graphics tool unlike Illustrator. All that excess crap just slows you down.
And what's up with the Illustrator pen tool?? worst thing i've ever used.
for me.. i'm praying FH gets aquired by someone else and carries on, so I too can carry on.
EXACTLY! Although I would now temper this with a few points. FreeHand lost focus when it started to include bitmap editing features... perhaps caught in the features war with Illustrator they forgot what I always loved most about the program "Decide what you are and be that"... the most efficient VECTOR illustration program. Now it feels like horrible bits of Fireworks have been grafted on the side, and the rejection drugs are not holding ground!
Now I use FreeHand 99% and 1% Illustrator for the features I think it does way better... creating and opening PDFs, saving web/office bitmap versions of vector stuff (bypassing the impossible to remove colour shift imposed by recent Photoshop versions), some non-destcructive vector filters (Round corners... on anything!), saving logo eps (FreeHand still has the bug of including additional fractional space around eps objects, STILL cannot save cross platform EPS) and actionscripts. In almost evey other respect it is abysmal. The worst features being colour swatch control (why do I want to create a colour swatch that is not global by default, no wonder I see so many logos with 5 variations of a similar colour), clipping masks... vomit... vomit... VOMIT. This is supposed to be a vector program yet Illustrator treats clipping masks the same way as photoshop... when selected and manipulated they are the sum of clip and content. In FreeHand a clipping path is THE object, cut and paste 50 wild shapes into your desired clipping path... say again... cut the objects and paste them inside the other path... yes this is an object based editor! Now the clipped objects are contained within shape of the path, whereas Illustrator everything is just under the clipping path. Illustrators idea of "Collect for output" is to embed placed graphics, this is disgusting. I was recently asked to repair a packaging handoff - 30 pieces of artwork saved as Illustrator files with embedded images... 8 GIGABYTES. By linking the embedded images I got the whole lot down to 45MB. But to collect for output, I had to copy all the files manually. Needless to say, if any Illustrator users know a way around any of my gripes, I looked hard but I'm not an expert, please tell me how.
The last 3 designers we have employed have all used Dreamweaver and Illustrator. They all said they hated Golive and FreeHand. Within a couple of weeks I was able to demonstrate how Golive and FreeHand would do almost everything easier. And they converted themselves. Not knowing a program go a long way towards your opinion of it. You need someone you knows the opposing application really well... whichever direction you go. And I've learned out of this process, learned that something I hated does some stuff better.
Still, I have little faith that a program combining the best of both will be possible. I think the two programs are an example of two utterly alien philosophies, two completely different approaches to the same task. I see FreeHand as a technical/designer's tool and Illustrator as an artist's tool. Two very different mindsets, and probably why most people are completely polarised ie they love one and hate the other.
But hey, even if they drop Freehand, we can still use it. I still use Dimensions 2 and 3 under classic (don't get me started on the abysmal implementation of it within Illustrator CS). I even had to dig out FreeHand 4 to open an eps from 1992 that MX or illustrator did not understand properly. The old apps still run just fine, and sooooooo fast on a dual G5!
