Comments on: IT Enquirer reviews Adobe Illustrator CS6: The dark interface rises

By: Freehanded

Freehanded — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 17:52:13 +0000

Totally understand your POV on output-especially on seps and print in the early days. Fonts too of course…BUT FH did improve and a lot of my work colleagues preferred it. As far as user design workflow I think it was more intuitive and let you design without too much technical menu distraction .
I find i work way quicker in FH doing the exact same thing than I do In AI.
Never thought i would say this but AI6 is pretty good though. I don’t necessarily want the FH workflow although I do prefer it, I just want some of the menus and tools:) Font manipulation could be improved and… more shortcuts dangnabbit…
Corel Draw…jeez…non entity. AGREED.

By: Error601

Error601 — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 16:56:40 +0000

All of the CS6 craps are ugly, slow, bloated crap (well, Photoshop is OK). WTF is with the NASTY UGLY dialog boxes? Why can’t Adobe just use the standard OS X interface widgets?

The best versions of Illustrator were: Illustrator 8 (Classic Mac OS) and Illustrator 10 (Classic/OS X). Once it got into the CS crap ALL the apps went to hell (on the Mac anyway – maybe it just took them a while to get their piles or legacy code over to a ‘modern’ Mac platform). I guess the CS3 apps weren’t bad (first Intel version), but they stopped working reliably on Snow Leopard, and stopped working altogether on Lion.

By: ecrabb

ecrabb — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 15:43:38 +0000

Wholeheartedly DISAGREE. I’ve been using Illustrator since its original release – before FreeHand even existed.

Illustrator’s workflow was/is more manual in some ways, but it was also much more likely to produce usable output and less likely to generate files that would create PostScript errors when you sent the file for output.

FreeHand got better output-wise once it started to mature, but I never liked the FreeHand workflow. I have friends that are the same way.

The FreeHand workflow and tools always reminded me of CorelDraw, which felt amateurish to me.

So, I for one, would be really disappointed if Adobe made Illustrator function more like FreeHand.

It’s really a personal taste thing, and depends on what “makes sense” to you. For some, it’s Illustrator. For others, it was FreeHand. For still others (which I’ll never understand), it was the POS CorelDraw.

By: bibleguys

bibleguys — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 15:41:18 +0000

Exactly! I have CS5 and it is extremely annoying. Everything is so complicated. I pay a premium to have professional software, and simple processes are buried, or require a decoder ring.

By: Jim R.

Jim R. — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 13:51:02 +0000

What’s even worse is the severe lack of really decent third-party Illustrator-like programs on the Mac. For Photoshop replacements there are plenty now like Pixelmator, but where is the “Vectormator” we all want that costs $30?

By: Freehanded

Freehanded — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 00:42:07 +0000

wholeheartedly agree!!! I still have a clone of snow leopard with freehand so I can “revert ” if need be.
the find and replace graphics menu…priceless.

check out http://www.freehandforum.org

By: solomé

solomé — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 00:26:46 +0000

thing i resented the most was after many versions of keeping often used keys commands consistently the same, they went and changed them. THEY MOST ANNOYING THING AND I STILL HAVEN’T FORGIVEN THEM.

By: silverhawk1

silverhawk1 — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 23:10:51 +0000

I want PageMaker 4 back.

By: Dirty Pierre le Punk

Dirty Pierre le Punk — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 22:33:33 +0000

Freehand 7 will never be beaten. Damn you Adobe for buying and destroying the best drawing programme in the market.

By: offstonypoint

offstonypoint — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 21:24:58 +0000

Reviewer is amazed by the tracing features! It’s the usual that reviewers are often not regular users of illustrator. Play with the whizbang 3D and automated features, forget about the core tools that continue to diminish and be sluggish from the weight of the fluff.

By: auramac

auramac — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 21:13:31 +0000

It’s a health hazard.

By: 3l3c7ro

3l3c7ro — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 21:02:38 +0000

Anything Adobe makes annoys me. The price was one of the biggest but the biggest is the watered down late to arrive Mac versions.

We haven’t even touched on Flash; the web moves on and Adobe is belly up in the water with this dead software. I want to see it buried soon. The stench is unbearable.

By: Zmarc

Zmarc — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 20:38:47 +0000

I fully agree. Freehand was and still is, far beyond Illustrator.

It amazes me the way great programs, better than the competition, disappear. (I’m thinking of programs like FullWrite, still just about the best word processor ever, more capable and yet somehow a fraction of the size and complexity of Word.)

By: studentx

studentx — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 20:28:22 +0000

Negative space is an amazing thing.

Stupid bright colors just screwup the interface and workspace.

By: Brian

Brian — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 20:18:54 +0000

To this day, my wife, a textile designer, runs an old G5 iMac alongside her new Mac Pro Tower. On her Mac tower is the usual set of Adobe CS6 solutions. On the iMac, she still runs Macromedia Freehand. The reason: despite all the advances in Illustrator CS6, Freehand is still much easier to use.

From drawing beziers to pasting inside, she can get more done in less time on Freehand. She then saves as an Illustrator 88 file and moves it over to Illustrator to finish the file. And she’s not alone. There are a number of designers and illustrators doing this worldwide.

If only the often arrogant product managers at Adobe would take a look at the simplicity and features Freehand. Of course, they can’t use the programming code. But Adobe’s systems analysts and product managers who work alongside their programmers could learn a lot from this now departed but wonderful old app. Adobe owns the intellectual property behind Freehand. It would be a travesty to throw away a set of great ideas.