I Love Freehand

Question

After working with Illustrator CS3 since it came out, I went
back to Freehand MX to do a business form and was reminded how
elegant and beautiful Freehand really is.
The selection tool, editable round corners, guides on it's
own layer, paste inside etc . are only a fantasy with Illustrator.
Maybe with CS5, they will catch up with the present version of my
darling Freehand. Adobe is making a HUGE mistake by dropping this
beautiful software.
I know that Freehand is dead, but it does not deserve to
die.

Answer 1

The Kitchen-Aid / French knife analogy I can buy.
The "ever faithful to my poor invalid wife" metaphor is,
well, just bizzare. And it will be viewed as bizzare by people on
both sides of the AI / FH divide (which shouldn't even be a
divide). It miserably fails to explain anything objectively
meaningful about FH's advantages to anyone who can exert influence
on the matter: Adobe staffers or Illustrator users. They are just
as "passionate" (though perhaps less literally) about AI. So who
can yell (or in this case, weep) the loudest bears no effect.
But that said, I don't think the French knife analogy really
fits, either, only for this reason: It paints FH as the less
technologically-sophisticated of the two. That's one of the
problems I perceive among AI-only users. They often mistake
complication for sophistication, when in fact, FH's interface in
most commonly-needed functions is *both* more capable and simpler.
That is the essence of true sophistication: It's about functional
elegance.
The fact is, most AI-proficient users who have never
developed proficiency in FH really do not know how much less
tedious things can be. So they are much more tolerant of needless
tedium because they think it the norm. They think it a necessary
evil.
I'd be wasting my breath here to list examples--that's better
done in the AI forum where the effort might actually have some
impact. So I'll just give the one most obvious example: FH's one
pointer has always been able to do more, do it easier, and do it
with more logical consistency, than AI's two. That's one of the
primary interface differences--not because of the presence or
absense of complicated features like Brushes, or raster Effects;
but because selection is absolutely bedrock foundational in any
object-oriented graphics program. The selection interface and logic
affects ease-of-use in *everything*. In FH, selection is both
simpler and more sophisticated.
So that's why I cringe a little whenever someone paints a FH
vs. AI analogy as a comparison between a complicated vs. a simple
tool. Neither is a simple tool. It's not the difference between a
rock-reliable hatchet and a table saw. It's the difference between
two table saws, one of which is simply built to higher quality,
usability, accuracy, versatility, and practicality standards.
Cutting tools is a particularly interesting choice of
metaphor. In your analogy, you would still have to admit that the
Kitchen Aid, despite its greater complication, can do alot more
slicing and dicing in less time than even the most carefully honed
French knife. So at least a production environment would argue in
favor of the Kitchen Aid. But the pro-FH argument is one that
argues in favor of *both* easier use *and* greater efficiency. When
it comes to cutting tools, AI doesn't even *have* a French Knife
*or* a Kitchen Aid. It has a pair of rusty scissors and a downright
neurotic, broken Exacto knife that doesn't know what an open path
is.
JET