Customer Reviews

FreeHand 10.0

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I had a really difficult time trying to decide between Macromedia Freehand 10 and Adobe Illustrator 10. Especially since ZDNet gave a bad review to Freehand, I was really confused.

I played around extensively with the demos of both software and this is what I concluded:

1. It all depends on why you need an illustration software. If you are primarily involved with desktop publishing, go with Illustrator because its way more powerful and has really nifty tools. Try imagining a software that includes the features of both Fireworks and Freehand - that's what Illustrator is.

2. However, if you are involved in web publishing or just want the very basic illustration toolset to work with software like Macromedia's Fireworks and Flash, get Freehand. Of course, barring the perspective grid, whatever you do in Freehand, you can do in Illustrator but transferring images to Flash is not always painless.

3. The other factor to consider is price. I think Freehand is heavily overpriced and costs almost the same as Illustrator which is ludicruous. If at all possible, get Freehand as part of the Flash and Freehand Studio where the price is more reasonable. Or you can get Xara which is cheap and yet has a great feature-set.

Overall, Freehand is a pretty good software with decent features and would sell a lot more if Macromedia was more realistic with its price and target users.

If you look, you'll see that FreeHand has the same number of "features" that Illustrator has. However, each of the features in Illustrator is SO much more deep than those in FreeHand. For instance, transparency in FreeHand is limited to solid colors of individual paths, and you can only stack a certain number (3?) of transparent paths on top of each other. Compare that to Illustrator, where transparency can be applied to anything, from text to paths to pixel images. And Gradients, and mesh. And just the stroke or the fill (and to mulitple strokes and fills on the same object). Or to groups or layers. And then there's all the Photoshop blending modes like lighten, hue, difference and more. And opacity masks.

Maybe "half" is giving FreeHand too much credit.

I am working on a Power Machintosh G3 with Mac OS 9.2. Having used Freehand 5.5 for several years I was looking forward to upgrading to a more functional version. I specifically needed the new function of creating PDF files.

None of my expectations of FH10 have been met.

Exported PDF files are incomplete. Items are dropped without any discernible reason. This makes the function useless except for base preliminary review purposes.

The exporting functions get hung up and it is necessary to toggle over to the finder to get the export to finish.

The application runs slow. It takes a full second to change over tools which leave me magnifying when I try to drag, editing text when I am trying to draw a line and pulling objects off the page when I was reorienting the view window manually.

The basic key command, Command (.) to stop and action, no longer stops anything that I have used it on even though it is referred to in the action window.

I have lost two major files due to application failures. One corruption was due to a crash and a second corruption of a file that occurred after saving it. These two failures alone have cost me days of labor. Saving the files regularly does no good if the file itself is corrupted due to some programming error.

I am running 4 times the requested memory for the application. That translates to 15 times my largest file. It cuts into my use of other applications for no increase in utility. There must be a big hole in the program regarding memory management as there is one files I can not open "out of memory" even though it is a small fraction of the application memory allocated.

To put the icing on this, customer support now requires hours of searching tech notes, which seem to be users comments, or paying to get information on a product they seemingly have not finished.

Freehand 10 is a good program. It's more simple than Illustrator with just about the same features and tools. It has it share of bugs though. I'd have given it a lower score if Illustrator wasn't its only real competition.

While I LOVE Freehand (I have been using it and buying all the upgrades/updates/whatever since 1988, when it was owned by Aldus!), I can't recommend it now. Unless they improve their program to appease the complaints all of us have (mainly, that it's evolved into what we hate about all the other programs out there), I'd recommend looking around. I've seen Xara LX twice today; there's also Inkscape (I used it a little while when I was on a PC, and it was pretty good - and was FREE). Also have noticed a couple I haven't checked out - Karbon14 and Skencil 0.6. I'd really recommend looking around before you spend $bigbux$ on a program that's not what it used to be 2-3 versions ago. I'm probably going to see if 8 will work on my OS 10.4.11 - probably not without using it in OS9 (maybe a pretty good solution). Keep looking, or DL a free trial.

The title speaks for itself, this is a reliable piece of software that all starting out animators should use. It is user friendly and VERY reliable. I enjoy using it, and I can't get enough of it.

Pretty nice stuff. Illustrator with direct Flash support, but without filters. Illustrator 10 is buggy though. Take your pick.