Saving a file in Illustrator is a very time-consuming process. The file I am saving is for an A2-size poster, with an overall background image and around 40 smaller images. Every time I hit ‘save’ Illustrator overwrites a 417mb file.
I don’t even like Illustrator. For many years I have been a Freehand user. I first encountered Freehand when it was Version 2 and it has been my vector graphic programme of choice from that time. Sure, I’ve used Illustrator at various times (the introduction of the bezier pen drawing time at Version 3 was a high point for me), but Freehand has always had the edge. Even now.
My regular saving of my work is a reflex action. Whenever I go to open a new document, at the end of a particularly intricate piece of work, or simply every 5 minutes – Apple+S. To me it’s common sense. And for the last few years it’s become essential. Freehand does not really like later versions of Mac OS X. Which is just a sad fact of life. Once upon a time you could always expect older versions of Mac software to run fine on newer versions of System. But not since recent versions of Mac OS X came out. The last release of Freehand was in 2004. Since OS X 10.4 ‘Tiger’ came out in 2005 Freehand’s performance has been, at best, ‘unstable’.
Given the size of the community of Freehand users out there, why doesn't somebody do something about this?
To find out why, it’s necessary to go back to 1995, when Adobe brought Aldus, makers of the popular PageMaker and Freehand graphic packages. While Adobe were very quick to release a new version of PageMaker to fill the ‘document layout’ void in their stable of software (too quick in fact, PageMaker 6 and 6.5 were absolute dogs that frequently shredded files beyond recovery rather than saved them, and by the time PageMaker 7 came out the design community, by and large, had moved to Quark Xpress). They had to rush out InDesign to capture that part of the market and the first couple of versions of that were buggy as well – but that’s another story.
Freehand was another matter. After all Adobe already had a vector graphics programme, Illustrator 6.0, and they didn’t need or want another. So they on-sold Aldus Freehand to the initial developers and Macromedia was born.
The rest is history. Macromedia didn’t stop at creating and supporting new and improved releases of Freehand, they went on to develop new and exciting products for web development. These included the highly regarded DreamWeaver, Flash and Fireworks programmes. They also acquired the ColdFusion development platform. They were so successful and became so big that Adobe eventually brought them out, acquiring Freehand for the second time.
This time they didn’t on-sell Freehand. They didn’t keep on supporting it. Instead they killed it. How I wish they had killed Illustrator!
