R.I.P. Macromedia FreeHand (2007)
losingfight.com
losingfight.com
Flash, Fireworks, and FreeHand. I could probably still run circles in the MX versions just based on muscle memory.
There’s a reason Adobe bought Figma. Wonder how long it takes before they kill that off.
Affinity might not have feature parity, but they do pro level tools at a price that should make any business consider jumping ship as belts tighten.
It’s essentially a shibboleth at this point
Would that by any chance be a reference to Apple's flavor of Lisp and a version of the PPC?
By mentioning a.b.m.a. I took you for an old school Mac user, like me.
but otherwise, yes, i'm an old school mac head since Apple II days
Not just luck — Adobe were fighting dirty with a look-and-feel lawsuit against Macromedia for use of tabbed palettes: https://web.archive.org/web/20010516014855/http://www.adobef...
“Adobe's tabbed palette, used throughout Adobe's products, are being copied by Macromedia® in many of its products, including Macromedia® Flash™ 5, Dreamweaver®, FreeHand® and Fireworks® software.”
Compare the infringing tabbed palettes of Flash 5 to the non-infringing (vertically-stacked) palettes of Flash MX:
- https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/old-software/macromedia-flas...
- https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/old-software/macromedia-flas...
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jul-30-fi-techb...
(fyi, I worked for Macromedia, and work for Adobe).
Adobe and partially Microsoft were the only things keeping Apple alive in the early to late 90s.
Apple was cornered in the creative market, and even slowly failing at that. Antagonizing Adobe could have meant them pulling out of the Mac market and probably bankrupting Apple.
Microsoft had a deal to keep Office running on Macs, I think they got cash and Apple shares.
They didn't do that out of pure goodness either. The Microsoft antitrust action began already in 1990 - many years before Windows 95 would enter the market... they needed Apple to be a viable alternative, simply to avoid being broken up. And Adobe didn't wish to be completely at the mercy of whatever Microsoft decided to do with their platform either.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
Adobe creative apps and Microsoft Office kept MacOS from becoming a toy OS, like Amiga.
this is also spectacular revisionism .. multiple categories of desktop software appeared first on the Macintosh computer i.e. they were invented for mass production on the Macintosh. Photoshop is not the only one like that. What happened quickly was MSFT expanding with contractual license agreements into huge markets and making one of the founders into The World's Richest Man for more than twenty years without fail.
MSFT had a famous mistreatment of graphic designers or other commercial artists, in complete opposite to Apple where the creative people thought they were the center of the media world. Some people do not take visual arts, print or the like as anything but "toy", apparently. You are reading type right now.
At any rate, there is a saying that says something like "Washington DC, Los Angeles Hollywood, Silicon Valley -- they all have intense inner groups and they all think that they are the center of the world. Of course the world is bigger than that" MSFT delivered desktop computers to the world.
And the alien.
I was sure I was going to use PageMaker for 10 hours a day for the rest of my life but you learn a little HTML and you realized that I wasn't ever going to be the next David Carson (NO ONE would ever be the next David Carson) so f- it.
Pagemaker was always garbage compared to QuarkXPress or even Corel Ventura. But Adobe really improved on it with InDesign, and a lot of places I knew who used Quark promptly switched.
FreeHand was particularly useful because of its integration with Flash. A lot of animation shops would use FreeHand because it was a better editor than Flash, but then import drawings into Flash for animation.
Also, every one of the editors had sort of a recognizable style. Adobe Illustrator was perceived as being more "prestigious", "imported" and most people I knew at the time who used it were Mac users (which was expensive for an artist) so that also probably left a mark.
Contrast today with when you probably had one or two dozen word processing programs with significant market share.
Affinity Designer seems to actually get kinda close to the OG Fireworks, at least on the surface, but I haven't really used it much, just casually played around with it.
What other alternatives are there, I really can’t get on with Illustrator.
From saving Final Cut to delivering the death blow to Flash about twelve years later. Imagine the alternate history if Apple had acquired FreeHand and/or Fireworks around the time Macromedia was mulling a sale to Adobe!
Also, it was cross-platform for Mac and Windows.
> As a technical aside, most versions of FreeHand (save the most recent ones) were written in a home grown language, that was humorously, and appropriately, called OOPS (Object Oriented Programming System). It was basically a preprocessor that generated C code that was then compiled to machine code.
IIRC, some early C++ implementations were described (by their implementors) as C++ => C preprocessors.
> Cfront was the original compiler for C++ (then known as "C with Classes") from around 1983, which converted C++ to C; developed by Bjarne Stroustrup at AT&T Bell Labs. The preprocessor did not understand all of the language and much of the code was written via translations.
cppfront [2] aims to do the same for translating C++ to C++:
> Cppfront is an experimental compiler from a potential C++ 'syntax 2' (Cpp2) to today's 'syntax 1' (Cpp1), to learn some things, prove out some concepts, and share some ideas.
Developing a C++ alternative in 1988 is a different story.
Unfortunately (for DVI) Adobe started off by incorporating PostScript into printing hardware, so there was little reason for anyone in the printing industry to look for alternatives.
It was a huge let down though when Adobe decided to replace PS with PDF. It still kind of is. I think about PDF as being a missed opportunity. Too many things in this format have been poorly designed, and, on top of it, it's forced for the situations where it shouldn't be used (eg. storing official documents) which generates a lot of hate for the format.
[0] A Japanese creature with the head of an elephant, the ears of a rhinoceros, the legs of a tiger, the body of a bear, and the tail of a cow.
68K Macs running 16/32 bit not-32-bit clean MacOS
68K Macs running 32-bit clean
68K Macs running multitasking systems
PowerPC Macs running System 9
PowerPC Macs running MacOS X
Intel-chip Macs running 32-bit MacOS X
Intel-chip Macs running 64-bit MacOS X
(likely) M-chip Macs
I worked for two such companies, but it was already the time when having your own in-house language started to feel weird. I believe that both transitioned to using something generic quite a while ago.
Still using it in Windows 11 on my Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 --- I just wish that there was a reasonable way to run FutureWave SmartSketch.
There have been a number of attempts to re-create it, most of which have stalled:
- GraviT
- Serif's Affinity Designer (I believe this actually opens FH/MX files)
It kills me that Adobe couldn't at least put all of Freehand's functionality into InDesign. Even so, I'd rather draw in ID than AI (which I've been using since v3.2 on a NeXT Cube and have never found very comfortable, despite the many FH features which it has copied).
Because just doing it in those technologies is often just as fast if not more productive than doing a mock-up in XD or Photoshop or Illustrator.
I’ll use a vector editor to edit shapes, and Photoshop for anything photographic or that client-side filters can’t handle but that’s about it.
So in a way I’m grateful for Adobe killing Fireworks and making the alternatives so unpalatable.
I barely used Fireworks, but primarily for the slicing of images into tables that was all the rage. I did use Dreamweaver and the Adobe app whose name is eluding me. One day I actually looked at the HTML/CSS from those apps, and it was not human readable at all. From that day forward, I started moving away from those apps and just wrote it by hand. So much less bloat. But I will admit, they were most definitely a nice set of training wheels to start the learning process.
GoLive? PageMill?
(I worked for Macromedia, work for Adobe).
Adobe shutdown the activation servers so they just work now with universal keys (same as the CS2). EOL, they don’t care
I’d even say it was the only tool that allowed to beat free hands with only using the mouse and keystrokes.
After the merger Jim Von Ehr took the time to meet with the San Francisco team, because we would be taking tech support calls for FH. It's the only time I remember an upper management exec meeting with frontline tech support staff.