FreeHand vs Illustrator
In the left corner, an oldie that hasn't been updated since 2004. In the right, Illustrator CS4, the modern, up-to-date, heavy weight champ.
It's interesting to see real world examples and how well FreeHand accomplishes them while Illustrator CS4 still doesn't seem to have a clue. It's as if the developers of Illustrator don't actually use it while the Macromedia developers of FreeHand MX did use it. It's also sad to see such innovative features and workflows killed off when Adobe acquired Macromedia and decided FreeHand should die and Illustrator should live on.
What bugs me about this isn't that they decided to kill one off in favor of another but I really wish that with all these causalities of the Creative Suite, Adobe would've folded in the best features of both. Why doesn't Fireworks have any of the cool features found in ImageReady? Or why doesn't Dreamweaver have the nice, familiar UI of GoLive along with the better implementation of Smart Objects of GoLive? I could go on but you see what I'm getting at. If Adobe thinks it's best to kill one competing app in favor of another, at least bring over the cool features of the killed app into the app that lives on.
Hat tip to Gedeon of Iconfactory for pointing these videos out to me via Twitter. Read about their Top 5 Illustrator Pet Peeves. It's an oldie but a goodie. Sadly, Illustrator CS4 still doesn't address most of them. And if you're a FreeHand fan/advocate, be sure to check out the Free FreeHand organization.
