FreeHand was once Macromedia's flagship title, but it has since become a victim of the success of the company's web design programs. It was passed over in the last two rounds of upgrades and is looking a bit neglected. Now that Macromedia is merging with Adobe, it's hard to see what sort of future FreeHand can have.
Don't write it off just yet, though. FreeHand MX is a powerful drawing program that many professionals have chosen over Illustrator. That's partly because of its multi-column, multi-page desktop publishing (DTP) features, which Illustrator has now just about matched. But there's plenty more to like. Perspective Grid, for example, lets you display a traditional vanishing-point grid and drag shapes around it as if they were in a 3D space, changing the shape and size automatically according to the rules of perspective. Actual 3D modelling is limited to basic
ADVERTISEMENT
extrusions, but you can set multiple rendered objects to share the same vanishing point, which gives the feature much more practical value, even if it's only for cheesy 1970s text effects.
The user interface is similar to Illustrator's with more cluttered toolbars but neater docking palettes. Standard features such as drawing tools, graphing, warping and distortion, auto-trace and colour handling are on a par - the two programs do things differently but equally well. FreeHand's transparency and raster effects are slightly more cumbersome than Illustrator's, but it has some great vector effects such as Sketch and Ragged. While FreeHand can't compete with Illustrator's creative Brushes, it's better for business users as it has the smart connector lines that Illustrator lacks.
FreeHand has decent built-in support for animation and interactivity, as well as the added benefit of integrating with Macromedia's web animation program Flash. You can import Flash movies and export in Flash format, and the two applications, along with Dreamweaver, can share common assets. Inevitably, its PDF export is less advanced than Adobe's Illustrator. FreeHand also lacks scripting, which is available only in the Mac version.
Overall, FreeHand is a very competent drawing package that's no more difficult to use than the others and has more depth than most. Sadly, at this price it competes directly with CorelDraw Graphics Suite, which offers far more breadth.
By Adam Banks
SPECIFICATIONS:
REQUIREMENTS Windows 98 SE/2000/XP, 600MHz Pentium III processor, 128MB RAM, 100MB disk space
