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FreeHand, Superman and the $80,000 Gas Tank

Words by Trey Yancy

June 2007

Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia in December 2005 was an important event in the evolution of digital creativity. Perhaps it would be better described as a watershed event, for not only did it represent the coming together of Photoshop and Illustrator with Macromedia's best-of-class applications Flash and DreamWeaver, but it also appeared to spell the end of Director and FreeHand.

Director, the multimedia Superman to Flash's Batman, is theoretically still alive and kicking, but it may not be for long. Adobe has yet to show its cards, but the writing appears to be on the wall. As Director fans will attest, Flash is the hands-down winner in the multimedia market, but Director does a lot that Flash cannot even touch, and its scripting tools and interface are nowhere near as quirky. Its high-level support for 3-D animation, its ability to easily create complex interactive CD and DVD projects, its ability to integrate Flash content and its other capabilities make it a must-have multimedia tool for many developers. Hopefully, if Adobe were to pull the plug on Director, it would integrate all of its winning features into its dominant little brother.

What is absolutely certain about Adobe's buyout of Macromedia is the recently announced cessation of development of FreeHand, the former nemesis of Adobe Illustrator. To most creative professionals this barely rates a mention, just as the theoretical buyout of Apple by Microsoft in the mid-1990s would not have caused a sniffle among Windows fanatics. So, why is the end of FreeHand a big deal? After all, Illustrator won, fair and square.

The concern is more related to Adobe's tendency to pay more attention to a competing application's sales figures than to the features that distinguished the rival app from the Adobe product. FreeHand fans didn't base their enthusiasm on ignorance of Illustrator's features but on their appraisal of the things FreeHand could do that Illustrator simply could not.

For example, at a time when Illustrator users were constantly having to stop and switch modes in order to see what their work actually looked like, FreeHand users were working in full color preview mode. While Illustrator users constantly enter key commands, FreeHand would intelligently and automatically change tools for you. While Illustrator users have to assemble folders full of documents or even abandon Illustrator in favor of a page layout application, FreeHand users were creating entire campaigns within a single document, combining multiple page sizes and color modes and including everything from business cards and press kits to full-size displays and billboards, all of which shared common content that could be updated instantly across all items with a single action. Such things were a definite snap under the nose of its rival, but it was hard to tell if Adobe was paying attention.

Well, Illustrator deserves its win, but Adobe's customers deserve to win as well. Although trailing by a full decade, the recent addition of the FreeHand-style ability to align and distribute points is a clear sign that Adobe is learning something from its former competition. Now that CS3 is on the boards and Illustrator CS4 is in the works, perhaps Adobe should take a very careful inventory of the reasons why FreeHand users are wearing black. Perhaps FreeHand's best-of-class features deserve to remain in the creative professional's toolbox. Losing an application is one thing, but losing a superior capability is something else entirely.

A story in closing: A woman buys a car at an auction held by a federal law enforcement agency. Noticing the car's tendency to quickly run out of fuel, she had a mechanic take a look at the gas tank. The mechanic discovered a sealed container with a stash of $80,000.00 inside. When the woman reported this find, she was told that the vehicle was sold "as is" and the money was hers. This is a true story.

My advice for Adobe is simple: Before it consigns FreeHand to the crusher, Adobe would be wise to check it carefully for valuables. It may not have outperformed Illustrator in all respects, but it had one heck of a gas tank.