Is anyone successfully using Freehand in Snow Leopard on an Intel machine? I saw some comments from folks who are having printing problems with the 10.6.5 update and I was surprised to see they mentioned Freehand.
I currently keep an old iMac G-5 running 10.4.11 for Freehand.
I would love to hear any success stories!
Thanks
Mac Pro Quad Tower, iMac G-5, G-3 Pismo PB,
Mac OS X (10.6.5),
Photoshop, Freehand, iWork, Excel, QuickBooks poweruser.
"No updates to FreeHand have been made for over four years, and Adobe has no plans to initiate development to add new features or to support Intel-based Macs and Windows Vista.
To support customer workflows, we will continue to sell FreeHand and offer technical and customer support in accordance with our policies.
While we recognize FreeHand has a loyal customer base, we encourage users to migrate to the new Adobe Illustrator CS5 software which supports both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs and Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Vista.
Illustrator CS5 offers powerful new features, including functionality designed to appeal to FreeHand users, such as multiple artboards, the Blob Brush tool and transparency in gradients.
FreeHand customers can switch to Illustrator CS5 for US$199 (volume licensing also available), and access complimentary resources to ease the transition. For additional information, please visit www.adobe.com/illustrator."
<http://www.adobe.com/products/freehand/>
It's done. It's gone. If I were you I'd do one of two things:
1 resign myself to having an old PPC Mac running the last version of OS X that will run on PPC, 10.5.8, and using that to run Freehand, knowing that sooner or later Adobe will drop all support for it and the longer I keep using it the harder it will be to move to something else;
2 move to something else as soon as possible, to minimise the pain. You don't have to move to Illustrator, although Adobe would prefer it if you do. You should move to something which is currently supported, though.
Those appear to be your choices. Pick one. There is no 3rd choice.
I too preferred Freehand over Illustrator and also had lots of files. For me it sort of works with 10.6 but has a tendency to run slow or lock up and quit randomly. I got round it by constantly saving every 2-3 minutes (command+s). Not great but it did the job and besides it was a habit I developed early on with the original beige macs. After a while I got fed up (on the other hand you might not?) and moved over to Illustrator. Freehand MX worked fine for me with 10.5 and that was on an Intel MacBook.
You could look at purchasing an older Intel Mac that originally came with Tiger or Leopard? To find out which models you could go for read this Apple kb article:
My suspicion is that your speed in FH is a practice effect rather than it being better than Illustrator. You are going to have to make the switch sooner or later though.
I have a purchased version of Freehand MX 11.0.1. Actually, an upgrade that I couldn't get to run in Snow Leopard. I thought 11.0.1 was the last version of Freehand. I noticed today though that Adobe had 11.0.2 available for download. So I tried that.
Still wouldn't launch or anything until you get the "fix", which is really a free registration file for anyone who wants to download it. Once you place it in the proper folder, as noted on the page I linked to, Freehand will then launch with the License Expiration as "Never", and the serial number as "Volume License".
So in essence, Adobe is giving the program away to anyone who downloads the "trial" software and the fix. As Whitecity alluded to though, it's only a matter of time until Freehand simply will not run in some future version of OS X. Better to start now trying to find some way to transfer your Freehand documents over into something that will open in Illustrator and make the switch.
The best way I see is to Export the data from within Freehand and choose Adobe Illustrator 7.x as the file type. The few I tested opened just fine in Illustrator CS5.
Edit: I take that back. Using one of Freehand's sample images, it opens incorrectly when saved out as an Illustrator 7 file. However, Illustrator CS5 had no trouble opening a Freehand 11 file as is. Color didn't display the same, due to Freehand's lack of color management, but it worked.
Kurt,
I have tried that as well.
I find that if the colors I use in Freehand are CMYK Spot colors (not any RGB's) the files retained the color call outs when opened directly in AI CS4. Have not tried it in CS5. Blends are a nightmare- but they always have been from AI to FH and visa versa.
Nice to know about the fix. That gives me the option of running it on the new machine as well as the older G5 without worrying about the registration validation. I would like to keep an older machine active and running FH, so that I can access the files as needed rather than trying to convert them all. But it will be nice to work on a file on one machine without having to network them back & forth.
That being said, networking in Snow Leopard is brilliant, I often just save my files directly to the drive on my G-5. So it really doesn't add much extra time at all.
Blends are a nightmare- but they always have been from AI to FH and visa versa.
Heh! Yes, they always look horrible in the opposite program. Once thing I haven't tested yet is printing one of Freehand's test images (like the apples) to a PostScript printer, then trying it out of Illustrator CS5. The blend
looks horrible in CS5, but would likely print the same.
I want to second that advice for running Freehand MX in 10.6's Rosetta AND getting the Adobe fix here:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/504/cpsid_50468.html This works well indeed.
There is also a helpful user community that I would strongly recommend any Freehand MX user visit:
http://freefreehand.org/ The forum there has advice for issues like this, working with Illustrator compatiblity, and dealing with future concerns for this software.
We have many users on our FreeHand forum who do use FreeHand successfully with 10.6
I myself just installed FreeHand on Snow Leopard 10.6.6
The registration file fix from Adobe usually solves the installation problem. You can also place your own registration file (if you still have it from a backup) in HD > Library > Application Support > Macromedia
To all FreeHand friends: Visit www.freefreehand.org and become a member. We need your support!
