A mac mentor to me for my first “REAL” computer(Not the toy-store, Program-As-U-Go ‘IBM PC, Make-Believe-It-Saves-Time-And-Work MicroSluff-Hacker’s_Delight-Box), handed me a 800 KB ‘High Density 3 1/2″ Floppy one day, and said, “Here’s an intro copy of a new drawing application. Play with it, use the color features on your new MacII, and tell me what you think” It was around April, 1988. (That Mac guru had single handidly written and debugged the new control code that ran on the NASA Space Shuttle Boosters, running on two redundant Perkin-Elemer computers, on his MacPro!)

I opened the small, single-floppy application, and Wah Lah! – AltSys FreeHand!

MY Oh MY! Did I have a ball! That little thing did everything Drawing, and More! Of course, Illustrator was out, and coverly hyped, as everything Adobe was, but my two mainstays for producing fun, best-of-breed graphics was PageMaker and Freehand! What a terrible blow to quality drawing and page design when Adobe mastered Aldus and then MacroMedia’s demise by underhanded, Microsoft-esque ‘Kill’ tactics.

Of course, Adobe is nothing more than a Microsoft clone with the same Pathogenic, ‘Borg’-like mastermind of ill-will toward any other software producer it deems a competitor. I sure hope and pray Adobe gets theirs!

Is there any hope Freehand may be revived by a license buyer? Or, is Adobe so ‘Borg’-minded that the ‘Entity’ would rather die than admit it is flawed at its base, and therefore continues to spawn drivel instead of suave production application code?

So, quit comparing both software and start adapting to the new reality. Every freehand user should now get used to InDesign plus Illustrator and not to Illustrator solo.

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

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

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

R.I.P FreeHand you will be missed

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.