the sweetest tongue

Rest in Peace, tool of choice.

Thursday, May 17th, 2007 | News, things happen

So it looks like Adobe has finally put it’s newly acquired stepchild Freehand (acquired from Macromedia) to sleep.

After a long and storied career, Adobe (neé Altsys, Aldus, and Macromedia) FreeHand has reached the end of its development road. The application has not been revised since Macromedia released MX nearly four years ago, after which the company removed FreeHand from the Studio product line. - John Nack on his Blog.

Sigh, for years I had been touting the wonders of Freehand over Illustrator, due to its integration with Fireworks, Dreamweaver, and Flash. I also used it for the bulk of my early print work, designing my very first book on it in high school, and using its export functions to output files for professional printers. I remember using Macromedia Freehand 8 on my first PC, and having to downgrade the files to Freehand 7 for the printers, a process that would take about an hour. Ah, the days of limitless patience.

Before Dreamweaver took over my attention, I waited for every Freehand update with eager anticipation, and it was the first program with which I used on both Mac and PC, doing my work at home on my PC and bringign the stuff to school on Zip disks (remember those?) to import into Pagemaker on the PowerMac G4.

When I started to branch into web design, I would make all of my mockups in Freehand, and use Fireworks to splice up my look into a workable web-page. I was very adamant in using Freehand first to create my mockups for every web-site I did until Fireworks gained a lot more tools in drawing. Then there was the Trace tool (before Illustrator CS2’s Livepaint) which made vectorizing images an easy (if not long) task. i managed to create interesting textures, and made some very satisfying, completely vectorized work.

Nowadays, I have to admit that do not use Freehand as much anymore. I use Fireworks for my mockups, and now Illustrator has become my drawing program of choice. I gave in and went with the tide. However, there will always be a special place in my heart for Freehand.

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