FreeHand 10.0
FreeHand 10 offers graphic designers powerful productivity features, including master pages, the new Macromedia user interface, and sophisticated vector-based illustration tools. You can enhance your project workflow by creating a document once, then publishing it across multiple media, including print, the Web, and beyond. Version 10 of FreeHand offers a rich collection of preview-ready presets that designers can use to achieve results right out of the box. True Contour Gradients allows you to create multicolor gradients that follow the contour of an outlining path. It also enables you to create visual effects with stunning realism, and to illustrate with much less effort. You can easily integrate multiple Macromedia Web publishing products into your existing workflow with the Macromedia user interface. Its immediate accessibility makes the authoring process more intuitive to current users and more approachable to new users. IPTC Header File Support enables cross-media publishing. FreeHand 10 lets you preserve International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) information in files that will be used by the news media. IPTC-aware third-party applications can access IPTC header information, such as copyrights, credits, captions, search words, and other data used to catalog image files. FreeHand now offers Web-standard page sizes. Create or convert to standard Web page sizes easily for consistent multipublishing results. With the Macromedia Flash Navigation Panel you can test your Macromedia Flash movies within FreeHand before you export them to Macromedia Flash. The resizable, modeless navigation panel streamlines the functions of the URL Editor and Set Note Xtra extensions by letting you apply Internet links and Macromedia Flash actions to graphics and text from within FreeHand 10.
FreeHand 10.0 Accessories
FreeHand 10.0 Reviews
The exporting functions get hung up and it is necessary to toggle over to the finder to get the export to finish.The application runs slow. to stop and action, no longer stops anything that I have used it on even though it is referred to in the action window. I am working on a Power Machintosh G3 with Mac OS 9.2. One corruption was due to a crash and a second corruption of a file that occurred after saving it. Saving the files regularly does no good if the file itself is corrupted due to some programming error.I am running 4 times the requested memory for the application. Items are dropped without any discernible reason. I have lost two major files due to application failures.
It cuts into my use of other applications for no increase in utility. I specifically needed the new function of creating PDF files.None of my expectations of FH10 have been met.Exported PDF files are incomplete. There must be a big hole in the program regarding memory management as there is one files I can not open "out of memory" even though it is a small fraction of the application memory allocated.To put the icing on this, customer support now requires hours of searching tech notes, which seem to be users comments, or paying to get information on a product they seemingly have not finished. Having used Freehand 5.5 for several years I was looking forward to upgrading to a more functional version. That translates to 15 times my largest file. These two failures alone have cost me days of labor. It takes a full second to change over tools which leave me magnifying when I try to drag, editing text when I am trying to draw a line and pulling objects off the page when I was reorienting the view window manually.The basic key command, Command ().
This makes the function useless except for base preliminary review purposes.
It has it share of bugs though. Freehand 10 is a good program. It's more simple than Illustrator with just about the same features and tools. I'd have given it a lower score if Illustrator wasn't its only real competition.
And Gradients, and mesh. Or to groups or layers. And opacity masks.Maybe "half" is giving FreeHand too much credit. Compare that to Illustrator, where transparency can be applied to anything, from text to paths to pixel images.
And then there's all the Photoshop blending modes like lighten, hue, difference and more. of transparent paths on top of each other. If you look, you'll see that FreeHand has the same number of "features" that Illustrator has. And just the stroke or the fill (and to mulitple strokes and fills on the same object).
However, each of the features in Illustrator is SO much more deep than those in FreeHand. For instance, transparency in FreeHand is limited to solid colors of individual paths, and you can only stack a certain number (3).
Especially since ZDNet gave a bad review to Freehand, I was really confused.I played around extensively with the demos of both software and this is what I concluded:1. If at all possible, get Freehand as part of the Flash and Freehand Studio where the price is more reasonable. Try imagining a software that includes the features of both Fireworks and Freehand - that's what Illustrator is.2. I think Freehand is heavily overpriced and costs almost the same as Illustrator which is ludicruous. I had a really difficult time trying to decide between Macromedia Freehand 10 and Adobe Illustrator 10.
The other factor to consider is price. However, if you are involved in web publishing or just want the very basic illustration toolset to work with software like Macromedia's Fireworks and Flash, get Freehand. If you are primarily involved with desktop publishing, go with Illustrator because its way more powerful and has really nifty tools. It all depends on why you need an illustration software. Of course, barring the perspective grid, whatever you do in Freehand, you can do in Illustrator but transferring images to Flash is not always painless.3.
Or you can get Xara which is cheap and yet has a great feature-set.Overall, Freehand is a pretty good software with decent features and would sell a lot more if Macromedia was more realistic with its price and target users.
Illustrator 10 is buggy though. Illustrator with direct Flash support, but without filters. Take your pick. Pretty nice stuff.
|
