More on the Adobe FreeHand Migration Guides
A couple weeks ago I wrote about Adobe’s recent release of FreeHand to Illustrator migration guides. Although I posed the question if the writing was on the wall for FreeHand, my intent was never to cast out harmful speculations to the creative community, but rather to get the community to start considering what the “new Adobe” means to our beloved applications on both sides of the equation. Well, it turns out there was a bit more to the story.
Mr. Gruber was kind enough to weigh in with his thoughts on the matter along with plenty of comments from longtime FreeHand users. Thank you all for sharing your thoughts. But it was one of the last comments I received from Adam Pratt on the post that I wanted to bring to everyone’s attention. Adam is the manager for the North American Technical Resources team for Adobe and co-author of a few GoLive and InCopy books. Adam wanted to let me know he had posted the real story on the FreeHand migration guides on his blog…
The real story is that this document was in development long before Adobe acquired Macromedia. It was conceived as a competitive “switcher” guide.
Be sure to check out his entire post — especially if you’re a FreeHand fan. Thanks again Adam for offering up more of the story to us.
You can tell from reading through the comments added to the original post, there are a bunch of people who favor Freehand over Illustrator and hope the development effort continues on FreeHand. I wouldn’t say that I favor FreeHand, but I don’t want to see it go away either. I think competition breeds innovation and there are a lot of features I appreciate in Freehand that I’d like to see brought forward and built upon in either a new version FreeHand or a fused version (à la Suitcase Fusion) of Illustrator and FreeHand. Giving us the best that both applications have to offer.
Lastly, if anyone is interested on my impressions of FreeHand, I did happen to review the latest version when it was released a few years back: The Creative Toolbox: FreeHand MX Integrates and Innovates. Let me know whether my points were valid or not.
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