I am asking if anyone still working with this vector freehand program. I tried to install on my Mac OS 10.7 but could not. What I was told when trying to install it was that the Adobe Illustrator is now the continuation of Macromedia Freehand MX. I never used adobe illustrator before and I can not find it easy to apply my Freehand skills onto it. Fpr example in Freehand I can make a text encircle evenly but in Adobe Illustrator I hardly find tools to do the same. Please advise.
Adobe hasn’t updated FreeHand in years, and as you’ve found out, it will no longer work with Mac OX 10.6 or higher. I’m surprised there hasn’t been an outcry, but it seems to have died with only a whimper.
I started out with Aldus FreeHand, then gradually switched over to Illustrator and Macromedia FreeHand before finally abandoning FreeHand when Adobe bought Macromedia and it became apparent that the writing was on the wall.
The differences between FreeHand and Illustrator are especially frustrating. They’re enough alike that it all seems familiar, but the differences in detail are so great that it’s maddening. It might even be easier to learn Illustrator from scratch than to endure the frustration of switching to it from FreeHand.
Even so, there’s really no choice but to switch to Illustrator unless you want to use another vector app, like Affinity Designer. Learning any of the alternatives would be just as frustrating, however.
Once you get past the frustrations and get the hang of the tools that work differently, Illustrator is a very capable drawing program. It’s been too long since I’ve used FreeHand to give you any specific advice about the differences, Sorry. Maybe someone else here can. Good luck.
Whew, Freehand. There’s a program I haven’t thought about for a long time. I learned Illustrator first and eventually picked up Freehand as part of a software bundle. I tried it out, but as you’ve found, it does enough things differently that your normal workflows don’t translate so well.
I had the same trouble going from Quark to InDesign. At my peak Quark fluency, I think I could work faster in Quark than I do today in InDesign.
Its not a perfect replacement or clone of Freehand to be sure, but there is a fairly capable vector graphics editor called Gravit. (https://designer.gravit.io/) It was originally designed by a team of Freehand enthusiasts, and incorporated most of the features of Freehand as well as some of Fireworks, which Adobe also killed off.
Gravit still takes a bit of getting used to, but I have used it quite a lot for basic website graphics, icons and such. I quite like it myself.
Thanks for your advice and hope to get along with it (illustrator). It’s true that frustration would come first but in the end I’ll get what I want.
Thanks Yossarian. Same as me here on how to switch from one program to another. In my peak here I prefer to work with PageMaker rather than to use InDesign.