FreeHand Forum

FFH's presentations to Adobe included a slide show of comparative features compiled from long-standing requests by the FreeHand membership, FreeHand/Illustrator experts, and the FreeHand Forum. Adobe was also treated to live demonstrations of various FreeHand tools. On a subsequent occasion, several local FreeHand users were invited to attend and give Adobe their honest, constructive opinions. A 55-page PDF has been made of our presentation and you can downloaded it here: http://www.freehandforum.org/images/AI_ ... atures.pdf

We invite you to give your feedback and additions to the presentation.

This is amazing show what FH can still do better than any other vector app, and still FHMX is now (2013) 10 years old.
If the guys in Adobe lives in this time and world, they´ll drop Illustrator overboard, and get FH back.

Overall, this was a great testimony to the strength of FreeHand.

Firstly "well done" for creating such a document and presenting it to Adobe. Brilliant.

Secondly I seriously cannot believe how a programme that is comparatively a pensioner can still run rings around Illustrator in so many areas. I was forced to change to Illustrator two years ago having used Freehand since version 2. I still curse the fact that there is no "paste inside" and no rubber-banding of the pen tool (you have it in Photoshop, why not Illustrator!!!). And your presentation reminded me of all the other features I still miss.

I blogged about how I found Illustrator difficult back in 2009 - http://blogs.shave.com/design/2009/11/f ... esigne.htm - and still today I really miss its "just works as expected" experience.

By all respect for your work, and please excuse me if this has already been said, I find it…, well, funny that Adobe employees use your – our – expertise for free (or even for pay) to plagiarise FreeHand (even if they technically own it). Are the creators of FreeHand still around, did anyone ask them? Otherwise, looking forward to the fruits of this collaboration…

A small note to your pdf: in FHMX closed paths are NOT a requirement to fill a shape (show fill in the prefs). Otherwise, a pretty representative presentation!

I certainly admire your perseverance in this matter. However I still can't imagine Adobe ever making any "useful" changes to Illustrator to compensate for your well documented lack of user-friendliness. As someone pointed out above, it's already been 13+ years. At this point, I seriously don't think they have had... or ever will have... the ability to even code/program these changes. Their engineers are just not top quality, or their platform frameworks are not that flexible... or more than likely both.

Even that "simple" little idea of an FH Converter Droplet is surely beyond their competence. Also, considering that you would probably have to be an Adobe CS6 Cloud subscriber to even use it, and need to muck up your computer with an Adobe Air installation (probably)... would it even be worth it, even if it did "kinda, sorta, on-a-full-moon-monday" work?

Was "the" or "any" product manager from AI or ID present in these talks? What was your take-away, gut reaction to these "teams"? Were they experienced engineers, or only "Product/Marketing" people?

Sorry for my skepticism, but again: 13+ years of slacking off with no discernable change in friendliness or suite integration on Adobe's part, does not install one small lick of confidence in me personally, that this thorough, engaging and pointed presentation didn't just go in one ear and out the other... in a "Flash".

I enjoyed very much reading the presentation! I used FH for a long time but not in the last few years. The Presentation reminded me of the great simplicity and power of FH. Would love to work again with FH or the hopefully coming "clone".

The presentation to Adobe reminds me why I use Freehand every day, and why I nurse along all six old Macs in our shop, as I can no longer buy new Macs, thanks to the abandonment of Rosetta by Apple.

I wish I could upgrade, but I will not, cannot, work without Freehand. I have Illustrator, one version old, however, it just gets in the way of developing what I develop. If I was forced to give up on Freehand, I would have to retire.

Very good presentation - covered all things I could think of.
BUT, it would be clearer -- less text and more wow -- if it had small videos of features embedded in a PDF.

Have used Illus since v3.2 then changed to Freehand v7 and much preferred it. Currently use FH on a Virtual PC.

keiththirgood wrote:The presentation to Adobe reminds me why I use Freehand every day, and why I nurse along all six old Macs in our shop, as I can no longer buy new Macs, thanks to the abandonment of Rosetta by Apple.

I do the same. And in the end, with the one exception of not being able to buy a new nice looking Mac, there is really absolutely no downside. I have a working setup of software and hardware. It has the right speed. It does everything I need from graphics, webdesign to video/audio. And newer software offers no improvement whatsoever, quiet the opposite: new software is slower, needs more disk space, has more disturbing copy protection, costs a lot of money again and brings more new bugs then features.