Adobe kills FreeHand

So the artless assholes have finally gone and done it. Adobe has axed FreeHand. Oh, they’ll still take your money and offer some semblance of useless customer support, but they won’t update it ever again — won’t even fix outstanding bugs. They’ll just take your money and pile-drive your abused asshole like Steve Ballmer.

This bums me out as I have always preferred FreeHand to Illustrator since it is more direct and flexible and has for years supported multiple page documents (and even lets you mix different sized pages in the same document). Unfortunately, I have watched FreeHand languish in the disinterested mits of Macromedia who actually saved it once from certain doom when Adobe bought out FreeHand’s previous distributor, Aldus. How sad and ironic that Adobe has, in the end, gone on to buy Macromedia. Such great technology wasted. Yes, I have a copy of FreeHand that works in OS X, but under Macromedia it saw little development beyond a sloppy port to carbonization so that it would run on OS X, and now we know that there will never be an Intel version.

But that’s corporate America for you. I’m fortunate that there are still a few solid alternatives out there. Intaglio may not have all the bells and whistles of FreeHand, or be as direct, but it sure as shit works more predictably and with greater finesse than anything the win.idiots who cluster-fuck in Adobe’s HQ could ever produce with 1000x the budget and 10x the programmers.

Fuck those guys.

The good news is that I have just gleefully dispatched Illustrator to the dank, slightly foul smelling depths of my Corbeille, hopefully never to return.

Corbeille is French for “wastebasket.”