FreeHand fans, I offer my condolences: on his blog today, John Nack, Senior Product Manager for Photoshop, announced that Adobe will abandon development of FreeHand in favor of Illustrator. Adobe’s website is mum on the subject at the moment, but John revealed the details.
First, some history. The venerable vector graphic application was originally created by Altsys but offered through Aldus, which then merged with Adobe. However, Freehand was returned to Altsys before being bought by Macromedia, which released its last version, Freehand MX, a few years ago. As you probably know, Macromedia was bought by Adobe in 2005, making FreeHand a redundant product from Adobe’s point of view, since the software giant already had similar applications in the form of their own Illustrator and, to a certain extent, Macromedia’s Fireworks.
If you want to know all the details, Adobe put together a FAQ (in PDF format). Confusingly, it appears that FreeHand will still be sold, even though it won’t be updated. Customer support for the product will remain, but Adobe is strongly advising users to switch to Illustrator CS3 — for FreeHand owners, that’ll cost $199 instead of the usual $599. FreeHand, you will be missed.
[via HardMac]
i have started my career with freehand 3.1, way back in the day....
It has been raging WAR for years...
Indeed, this is the death of an era.
Freehand was a great vector program, not falling short of illustrator, sometimes even exceeding it.
Freehand RIP.
you will definitely be missed.