To Illustrator or to FreeHand, that is the question. While many graphic designers sated by Adobe Illustrator may resist change, FreeHand 10's new and enhanced features — such as a Contour Gradient tool, a Symbol Library, and new brush strokes — might just be enough to convert even the stodgiest of artists.
FreeHand, like Illustrator, is a vectorbased drawing program that provides a comprehensive environment for drawing professional illustrations, logos, icons, and other graphics that you can edit and scale. Pro Illustrators and doodlers alike can create everything from Web-based graphics to photo-realistic illustrations.
For Mac OS X users, here’s the good news: FreeHand 10 works like a dream on the new OS. It’s faster (on a G4), slicker, and crashes less frequently. We didn’t come across any noteworthy bugs under Mac OS X, either. The bad news: It's sluggish on G3 systems, due to Mac OS X’s need for power.
One of FreeHand 10’s most exciting new features is the Contour Gradient optionpart of the Fill Inspector — which allows designers to create bevels and fills with near- Photoshop-quality precision. And our favorite, the Envelope feature, allows you to distort text to fill almost any shape — you won’t find this feature in Illustrator.
FreeHand 10 also offers tools geared toward small design firms looking for an allin-one production solution. Its Master Page features — you can find similar tools in QuarkXPress — allow you to set up templates, making it easy to create page attributes for use across multiple pages. You can also export multiple-page PDF documents; Illustrator only allows single-page exports.
Some features facilitated our artistic skills. The Perspective Grid brought us back to the days of sketchpads and number 2 pencils — trying to determine a vanishing point with proper perspective was not exactly our strongest suit in design school, but the Perspective Grid enabled us to easily place objects on its 3D grid with multiple vanishing points already set up. Creating tunnel vision has never been simpler.
The new Symbol Library makes editing a collection of spawned graphics easy. You can create a graphic (the parent symbol), store it in the Library, and then use it multiple times (Instances) in a project. You can universally edit all instances via the parent symbol in the Symbol Library. If you import FreeHand instances into Flash, the parent symbol follows, maintaining the relationship between the symbol and its Instances. This is a veritable coup for Flash animators, who will benefit from FreeHand’s powerful graphic output.
The newly enhanced, editable Spray and Brush strokes impressed us — these allow you to add an instance or a series of instances along a path and control their behavior. Editing the entire path is a snap.
While Macromedia has long had some of the most powerful tools in the business, generally you can classify its user interfaces as somewhere between a bad joke and a bad dream. The good news is that the company is learning. Taking a cue from Adobe, Macromedia adopts a more consistent interface across Dreamweaver, Flash, and FreeHand, and cleans it up considerably — this promises to make transitioning between the apps a lot less painful. FreeHand’s pen tool now actually looks like...well, a pen. When drawing Bezier curves, you finally have an actual pen and pointer as opposed to the awkward crosshair found in previous versions.
Despite its advances, the interface still has plenty of room for improvement. We hate having to double-click a tool to change its behavior options — perhaps because we’re used to Photoshop. Even more ridiculous is the fact that after you make your changes, you have to close the Options window before you can draw again. This makes tweaking a tool to produce a desired effect extremely difficult, as you have to continually return to the toolbar, double-click the tool you want, change the settings, close the window, draw, and — if you still don’t get it right — delete your work and start all over again. An ever-present options palette would serve our needs much better.
While many of the new features are quite impressive, some are less so. One good example is Flash compatibility. You can create and script Flash animations in Freehand, then export them for use independently or in other Flash movies. Unfortunately, FreeHand’s Flash animation abilities ran out of steam pretty quickly (no animation timeline?!), causing us to abandon FreeHand’s impotent interface for Flash’s more robust one.
One feature we would have liked to see (added to Illustrator 9 and available in QuarkXPress for years) is the ability to define the size of your drawing board when you open a new file. In Freehand 10, you have to redefine the page size in the Document Inspector after creating the page, which is a little annoying.
We also found FreeHand’s keyboard shortcuts frustrating — they don’t all conform to the shortcuts in other Macromedia applications. Our familiarity with Flash caused us to inadvertently engage unwanted FreeHand functions or wonder why we couldn’t engage a function (for example, Command-L opens the Library in Flash, but not in FreeHand, where you’d use F11).
Despite these failings. FreeHand 10 is a robust app and a worthy upgrade for Web designers (especially Flash designers, who will find much better drawing tools in FreeHand than in Flash), print designers, and illustrators seeking a simple solution for all their production needs. Its unique new features and great enhancements might raise quite a stir in Illustrator’s avid fan base.
Higdon, Jude, Wybo, Amy. (September 2001). FreeHand 10. MacAddict. (pgs. 44-45).
Macromedia, Inc.
Applications
out of 10 (1 vote)
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2017-04-22 / 
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FreeHand_10.cdr
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
