Goodbye FreeHand, You Will Be Missed

Article written by Brad Kozak, founder of GrokMedia

Adobe announced today that they are going to drop FreeHand. I’m losing an old friend. A sidekick. Someone who’s been there for me, through thick and thin, for years. My wingman. My right-hand. My jack-of-all-trades. And an indispensable part of my life. Macromedia Freehand (a.k.a. Aldus Freehand, a.k.a. Altsys Virtuoso).

What is is about a tool that makes us want to use it, well past the time it has reached it’s own end? FreeHand is about three product revisions behind the curve. It doesn’t support a mouse wheel, has an interface that can charitably be called “creaky” and is on few “must-have” lists of designers. Most of the market long since moved over to Illustrator. But not a loyal few. Now, even those of us who have stood by FreeHand lo these many years will soon likely have to make the switch – not by choice, but simply because I suspect that FreeHand’s new owners – Adobe - have few reasons to keep it around.

Whither FreeHand? Well, to understand that, you have to understand where it came from, and how drawing tools evolved.

I started using FreeHand when I became the Senior Product Manager for it’s sister version, Virtuoso. Altsys Virtuoso was essentially FreeHand for non-Mac and non-Windows running on top of DOS platforms, in particular, Sun’s Solaris, NeXTStep, and Windows NT (which ran, not on DOS, but on a variant of OS2). Unlike the drawing tools I knew at the time (Micrografx Designer and Corel Draw) FreeHand/Virtuoso was a different beast – a Mac-centric application that was written by a company that really understood typefaces and how they worked. That was HUGE in the early 90s, because most drawing tools had been created by engineers that understood CAD – not graphic design. FreeHand, for me, was always just one step short of an ideal tool. It had features that I loved – multiple sized pages within a single document, at a time when most drawing applications couldn’t cope with more than one page at a time. FreeHand was – and is – about 80% easy to use, and about 20% “why is this feature so bloody difficult?” To this day, I find FreeHand far more intuitive than Illustrator and far easier to use for most things. But as mankind has proven time and time again, a superior product does not insure market domination, and products that come to dominate a market eventually suck the life out of their competitors. Such is the fate of FreeHand.

So how do products lose their edge? Let me let you in on a little secret. I’ve worked for two major graphic design application software publishers in my life (Micrografx and Altsys). I’ve known the head of development at both companies on a first-name basis. Interestingly, I had the very same conversation with both of them. Keep in mind, I was a “marketing” guy at both companies. And at software companies, marketing is to development what a banjo is to an orchestra (apologies to Martin Mull). The conversation went something like this…[me]: “I’ve just come back from a [trade show, major customer meeting, user group] and our customers would like us to ad a feature that does [X].” [the head of development]: “As software engineers at a successful software company, we know a lot more about writing software than our customers…WE decide what features go in our software – why should WE listen to THEM?”

I’m NOT making this up. That quote is an almost verbatim transcription of what BOTH guys said to me, on more than one occasion. Coincidence? I think not. No, you see, most companies have a kind of ivory tower mentality about them. Micrografx had it. So did Altsys. Macromedia was, in many ways, different. I feel a great measure of sadness, because of this, that Macromedia has been subsumed into Adobe. Now mind you, Adobe’s not a bad company. At all. After all, they make Photoshop, the greatest thing that has happened to images since the invention of the lens. But Macromedia was something special. So was FreeHand. But towards the end of it’s product life cycle, even Freehand fell victim to the forces of development inertia.

What is this inertia of which I speak? Here are my Top 10 Reasons to Avoid Making a Product the Best It Can Be:

1. We’ve always done it that way.
2. It’s never been done that way before.
3. If we change it, we’ll alienate our loyal users.
4. It’s too much trouble to fix.
5. Nobody complains, so why fix it?
6. That would require a complete rewrite of our code base.
7. We can fix problems or add new features – which do you prefer?
8. We didn’t think of it, so it can’t be good.
9. THEY used a ridiculous kludge – WE’ll do it RIGHT…but that will take months of development time.
10. Our engineers would rather work on their own pet features – other features can wait.

All software falls victim to one or more of these problems from time to time. Most users don’t realize how difficult a process it is to develop software at all, especially to prioritize a “wish list.” As FreeHand fell further and further behind in the features race with it’s competition, I kept hoping that the demands of the market would force Macromedia to come out with a new version that would blow the doors off the competition. But that doesn’t happen in “mature” markets. Eventually, Macromedia couldn’t justify spending the money to rev a product that wasn’t a best-seller. They needed that money to put into Flash and Dreamweaver development. Such is life.

So why such loyalty and affection for a product that is, by most user’s estimation, “old and creaky”? Simple. It’s ridiculously easy to use (at least for the most part). And as to the parts that had a steep learning curve, once you understand them, you can practically fly. (In that way, it’s a lot like Photoshop. Those that must learn it, curse it. Those that know it, love it.) FreeHand’s power lies in it’s simplicity. You wanna mask something? Just take the objects to be masked and paste them inside the mask object. Change your mind? A simple key-combo, and both mask and masked materials exist separately. Want gradients? No problem – and no masking. How about manipulating text? FreeHand gives Quark and InDesign a run for their money.

I use FreeHand as my go-to tool for almost everything. Logo design. Flash pre-production graphics. Letterheads. Storyboarding. You name it, I’ve used FreeHand to get it done. As a freelancer, I’m always having to watch the clock. If an app will save me time, I use it. It’s telling that I use FreeHand more than any other design app, outside of Flash. For print work, my default application if FreeHand. For logo work, it’s my first – and only – choice. I own Illustrator and I’m more than a little proficient with it, but I use it ONLY when I must. Most of the hours I log with Illustrator come down to opening PDFs or making sure my FreeHand-created EPS files can be opened without changes in a client’s copy of Illustrator.

Will I make the switch to Illustrator? Probably not – or at least not until they make Illustrator easier to use, or until FreeHand won’t run on the current version of Windows. I don’t like resisting change. But unless you are changing to something better, change is not progress – it’s just change.

Still, Adobe has not yet pulled the plug on FreeHand, at least not officially. Yet. From where I sit, though, it’s only a matter of time. So rather than lament the passing of a great tool, I prefer to offer up a suggestion, in the hope that something good will come of this passing. It is my fervent hope that Adobe will pour over the source code of FreeHand, and grab those features that made it unique, then add them to Illustrator, and/or to Flash. I would hope that Adobe takes this opportunity to rethink Illustrator, and perhaps take time to fix all those idiosyncratic “features” that drive us FreeHand guys ’round the bend. Then perhaps, they’ll add all that is/was great about FreeHand and add them to Illustrator, making one great application out of the ashes of both. Hope springs eternal. In pace requiescat, FreeHand. We hardly knew ye.