Adobe Illustrator feature request video series
This is the first in a series of screencasts by illustrator Garth Bruner demonstrating the differences between Adobe Illustrator and Adobe’s acquired-and-now-discontinued Freehand. It’s a plea for Adobe to migrate and incorporate some of Freehand’s more intuitive features into Illustrator. Can’t wait to see more.
EDIT: Garth informs me that the videos will do more than just compare Illustrator to Freehand. He’ll be using several other applications as reference points in order to pinpoint some of Illustrator’s shortcomings.
via Garth’s Twitter
That would be great but I’m not holding my breath. Now that they own the competition they really don’t have any incentive.
I also dislike the Adobe Illustrator interface although I’ve not used Freehand.
What I can’t stand about Illustrator is how heavily dialog and panel-based it is. Everytime you want to do something, you have to open a dialog or floating palette. I’m sick of their floating-panel-for-everything approach to interface design.
I’m on a PC and personally think Xara (a PC-only vector illustration program) beats Illustrator hands-down in the usability stakes. Watching how Freehand creates stars/polygons in the video above, I think Xara still beats it.
There are some demo movies of the Xara interface here
http://www.xara.com/products/xtreme/demos/
It could have been great, but the guy seems to be a beginner with AI, a lot of his complains are just because he’s used to the FH way and doesn’t know the AI way to do the same thing. He’s got some valid points, but they tend to be buried under his inexperience…
It’s interesting to see how FH works(ed), for an AI user like me though… The polygon tool in FH seems indeed much better.
Another thing is the idea that because Adobe bought Macromedia, they can just put whatever FH feature they want in AI… As a developer, I can tell you that it would be GREAT if it was that easy… ;)
thanx garth for charging adobe’s citidel!
Freehand rocks illustrator off the merry-go-round! It was sooo much easier to use, and at our agency we had the ‘illys’ and the ‘handers’, we were always taunting each other
when we found something under the hood that was better!
to me ‘ai’ is like the ‘pc’ of programs when ‘fh’ was the ‘mac’.
IT WOULD BE GREAT if the proGRAMMAS would modify Ai with the better
features of FH, like you demonstrated in the vid, but corpoRATIONS
that were ’stuck with to draw with’ can’t figure what the fuss’s about…
or what these little complaining squeeks are!
mark @
ISM &
BAMm
thanx garth for charging adobe’s citidel!
Freehand rocks illustrator off the merry-go-round! It was sooo much easier to use, and at our agency we had the ‘illys’ and the ‘handers’, we were always taunting each other
when we found something under the hood that was better!
to me ‘ai’ is like the ‘pc’ of programs when ‘fh’ was the ‘mac’.
IT WOULD BE GREAT if the proGRAMMAS would modify Ai with the better
features of FH, like you demonstrated in the vid, but corpoRATIONS
that we’re ’stuck with to draw with’ can’t figure what the fuss’s about…
or what these little complaining squeeks are!
mark @
ISM &
BAMm
I use Freehand for 9 years now, and I don’t use it only for layouts, I also do drawings with this program. I would have no problem to switch to Illustrator if they would make Illustrator as easy to work with as Freehand.
What I strongly feel about Adobe’s decision to kill Freehand is that they don’t judge with their brains but they judge with their hearts. Imagine that Adobe would have in their portfolio a competitor software for Macromedia Flash. They would probably kill Flash as well.