A Heavyweight Battle: FreeHand 9 vs. Illustrator 9
By Clayton E. Crooks II
Macromedia's FreeHand and Adobe's
Illustrator have been at the forefront of vector graphics software for many years. They've both undergone retooling and are ready to face off again. The version 9 updates reposition them with an increased focus on the Internet and provide an array of innovative new features.
User Interfaces
The UI is the first thing you see when you open an application, so you'd think that Adobe and Macromedia would have taken more care to clean up their interfaces. Neither product had a streamlined interface in earlier versions, and with the exorbitant features the applications now have, the on-screen tangle has only increased. However, developing a UI that
pleases everyone is impossible. Designers are leery of annoying the long-time users, as they frequently become immune to
eccentricities.
UIs are perhaps the only area in which the upgrades have failed repeatedly. FreeHand, for instance, has a powerful new Perspective tool that's undoubtedly one of the best additions to the package.
