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Comment by themagician | Hacker News Reader

I mastered both FreeHand and Fireworks instead of Photoshop and Illustrator. Such bad luck. I loved them both. I remember the first time I bought he Macromedia Suite. It seemed so expensive to me at the time.

Flash, Fireworks, and FreeHand. I could probably still run circles in the MX versions just based on muscle memory.

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> Such bad luck.

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...

fyi, Macromedia had a counter law suit, and both eventually settled.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jul-30-fi-techb...

(fyi, I worked for Macromedia, and work for Adobe).

I'm kind of surprised Apple didn't sue literally everyone for ripping off the MacPaint interface. I know they had the more general Look-and-feel lawsuit against MicroSoft, but they didn't seem to capitalize on Bill's great UI innovations.

Don't think they did it out of the goodness of their hearts.

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.

> Adobe and partially Microsoft were the only things keeping Apple alive in the early to late 90s.

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....

this is weird revisionism .. Apple's dollar volume many multiples of Adobe. It was Adobe that was in scarcity mode. It was MSFT that was crushing things left and right. I think Apple behaved like predatory jerks in MSFT-envy at times, but the reality it complicated.

It's not weird revisionism... MacOS was lacking quality apps and was barely hanging on until 1997.

Adobe creative apps and Microsoft Office kept MacOS from becoming a toy OS, like Amiga.

> MacOS was lacking quality apps

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.

Fireworks was the best. Not compared to the crazy stuff Photoshop can do these days with 3D models and all that AI wizardry, but unlike Photoshop Fireworks could be used to draw box with a border using it's shape tool like Visio. I would use it to create web layouts for what would become DIVs in web design. And then there's Director, which was pretty powerful at the time they retired it. I think I still have a copy of the final version. Nothing beats that stacked timeline with scriptable frames and how it ultimately made it into Flash (formerly FutureSplash). Those were the days. I think I still have all the digital books for those products.

I very firmly feel that Aldus[!!!] FreeHand had the better vector drawing UX than Illustrator, and I still feel that way even though I've used Illustrator exclusively for the last 25 years

It was far more intuitive and the vector drawings copied over flawlessly to Flash. Illustrator drawings copy/pasted always had issues.

Agreed. They bought the superior tool and killed it off. Fireworks is still lamented by many.

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.

Affinity does 80% of what I need, though its interface for some things is very ...unique. But when I need that 80%... or even just the 1% of Illustrator that is "text on paths, done right", there I am, paying the rent to the feudal lords.

I sometimes pine for Aldus Photostyler and its clone tool.

In college, my roommate was taking classes learning Freehand and Illustrator. Each version release would leapfrog the other product. Being industrious, I did all of my roommate's assignments on my own, and I learned the apps on his tuition. I didn't do his work for him. I just did it to learn. I was only able to do this because of a.b.m.a. I still use that knowledge from his classes on a daily basis.

May I ask what is a.b.m.a. in this context?

alt.binaries.mac.applications

It’s essentially a shibboleth at this point

Dylan604…

Would that by any chance be a reference to Apple's flavor of Lisp and a version of the PPC?

I can't tell if you're joking or not, so on the chance you are not...No.

I was serious. PPC 604 and Dylan, the language.

By mentioning a.b.m.a. I took you for an old school Mac user, like me.

sorry, but no that's not the origin. 604 => Goa

but otherwise, yes, i'm an old school mac head since Apple II days

I am surprised nobody has tried to create a drawing program that tries to be more like Freehand, after all this time. I would buy a copy in a flash.

What other alternatives are there, I really can’t get on with Illustrator.

Affinity Designer is one, but I can’t say how much it’s like Freehand

Thanks for the pointer. Searching around the term Affinity Designer I found out that Belight, which makes other software I use (and are Ukrainian, double win) also make this, which I will try out. https://amadine.com/

Seemed like you always needed a trio of main apps. In the graphic design market of the 90s, it was Quark, Photoshop and Illustrator. To a lesser extent it was Pagemaker, Photoshop and Freehand.

Quark actually had at least one bundling w/ Freehand, and some folks used Macromedia XRes instead of Photoshop.

XRes was interesting, it would do all the imaging operations at reduced resolution to make them work quickly, and then when you saved the document it would perform all the actual work at full res. It sort of worked, but saving could appear to be really slow.

Quark was awesome. Best layout program ever. Still haven't used anything as good.

The only thing I remember about Quark is that Quark 4 seemed super outdated and old, but it's what the industry standardized on and Quark 5 totally bombed.

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.

This is very dependent on the country or language of your audience, but also Apple computers availability. In Israel, for example, FreeHand was by far the most popular tool for vector editing because of easier integration with right-to-left writing. Former Soviet Union countries almost exclusively relied on CorelDraw. Not sure why, but my guess is it was somehow easier to pirate 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.

In general, professional/prosumer local desktop software has mostly collapsed into one (sometimes two) products per category and the categories themselves have become fairly rigidly defined. There's other more mainstream consumer packages but I'm guessing most of those are increasingly marginalized by open source and hosted services of various sorts.

Contrast today with when you probably had one or two dozen word processing programs with significant market share.

Fireworks was the shit!

What do you use currently in place of Fireworks?

yeah i need to get at the master for python's logo

https://www.python.org/community/logos/

Nothing, really. I just abandoned 1:1 pixel design all together, because that's how I used Fireworks. I would do everything based on pixel ratios between objects. It kind of defined my art style since everything was geometric to some extent. Now I'll just sorta eyeball everything in Photoshop or Illustrator.

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.

I still use Fireworks CS6

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