Take all that energy you are using whining and complaining about Freehand dying, and apply it to learning Illustrator.

Blah, blah, blah...but Freehand is better!....blah blah blah...but Illustrator can't do this or that....blah blah blah.

Times change. Software evolves. Move on or get left behind. Don't start crying when nobody wants to continue developing the software you love.

Want to continue using Freehand? Use an old computer, with an old OS. Want modern compatibility? Learn new software!

It's like complaining that your favourite TV show got cancelled, and is being replaced but some crappy sitcom. Is the solution to sue the studio, or start making your own TV show in your basement? Nope! You move on!

Freehand was a port of an OS 9 code base. It's guaranteed to be FUGLY! It would take a non-trivial amount of time to get it compiling under XCode, let alone making it work well with Snow Leopard.

And the legal issues of open-sourcing it are also non-trivial, as it probably includes code licensed from 3rd parties, which would either have to be replaced or rights negotiated. Sun is going through this right now, for a product they themselves created (namely, Java), and they have had a difficult time of moving it to open-source. Trying to do the same to a source-base that you purchased from a 3rd party, that is much older, makes it much more difficult.

These people would have a better chance if they banded together and tried to hire a group of people to rewrite Freehand from scratch. Of course, then it would be blatantly obvious that there is nowhere near enough interest in this product to support development of this product...

I agree, it sucks. But Adobe bought FreeHand to bury it. That's it.

Adobe has a hard enough time getting one drawing app out the door. I don't see them investing resources in another app that does the same thing. It'd be like them still developing or releasing bug fixes for PageMaker.

Hey Freehand lovers, who said you had to upgrade to an Intel machine with Snow Leopard? If you love Freehand so much, keep running it in system 10.3 or whatever on your G5... nobody is disabling your software or making you upgrade. They sold you a product that was spec'd to run on a G4/5 six years ago. They never promised you anything more. Get over it and move on, or keep an older machine dedicated to running antique software.

Freehand stopped working for me in Leopard a couple of years ago. I finally gave up and moved to illustrator.

It would be nice if Adobe took a look at some of the features in Freehand and folded them into Illustrator. I won't hold my breath, since Adobe seems more interested in kneeling to their masters in Redmond than catering to their core users.

Yeah, who do FreeHand users think they are? Who ever heard of asking a software developer for improvements to the software? How dare you!!! I had only been waiting for 10 years for illustrator to support more than 1 page per document, now that's what I call a responsive, customer focused, software company!! CS4 is AWESOME!!

FreeHanders should just shut up, stop whining and pay the Adobe upgrade tax for bloated, slow software that doesn't function properly.

Upgraded to CS3? tough luck, won't work well with 10.6 - upgrade again!!
Upgraded to CS4? Upgraded to new, fast Mac? - tough luck, CS4 crawls along like a bloated 3 day dead hedgehog - Upgrade to CS5! Buy a new Mac!

Yay, I loved having to migrate to Illustrator, it makes me so much LESS productive for so much MORE money! Oh happy days!!!

I am a software project manager (NOT with MS or Adobe..in fact we work on Open Source Projects), BUT you have to see Adobe's position on this. They have limited resources. If you were a stockholder, would you want your company making investments in a product with a vastly shrinking market share when you have a vastly more popular product in your arsenal?

and BTW Frester2, not sure what you are running CS4 on, but on both my laptop and desktop, CS4 is pretty close to awesome. Illustrator is fine and quite responsive. Again, Adobe probably has limited resources and it is difficult for a company to support (nearly) yearly upgrades in an OS (including development and Test). They have no desire to lose customers, but they also have to support an existing codebase. Have you ever tried supporting multiple versions on multiple OS's?

It is not easy.

Does final cut express 1 run perfectly on Snow Leopard (I really don't know if it does or doesn't), or should users upgrade to the most recent version?

Either upgrade or don't, but offer solutions instead of complaining.

I have moved to inkscape about a 2 years ago and it is probably the best vector editing program I have seen. The learning curve is much smaller than either freehand or illustrator. Plus there are tons of online tutorials so you can get the most out of the program. And it runs on all platforms.

Check it out at http://www.inkscape.org


thedude

You can commiserate with the FrameMaker fans. FrameMaker was a great application that was far more suitable to long technical documents than word or InDesign. Adobe killed that as well.

By the way, if your lawyer won't take your case, then that should be telling. It's not illegal to discontinue a product, no matter how bad you want to see it supported.