Freehand 7 Views

• Software

FreeHand 3.0 sold for $595 in 1991. New features included resizable color, style, and layer panels including an Attributes menu. Also tighter precision of both the existing tools and aligning of objects. FH3 created compound Paths. Text could be converted to paths, applied to an ellipse, or made vertical. Carried over from version 1.0, FreeHand 3 suffered by having text entered into a dialog box instead of directly to the page. In October 1991, a 3.1 upgrade made FreeHand work with Mac OS 7 but additionally, it supported pressure sensitive drawing which offered varying line widths with a users stroke. It improved element manipulation and added more import/export options.[7] This version was also ported to the NeXT system under the name Virtuoso.[8] Virtuoso continued its development at Altsys influencing FreeHand 4.

By late 1994, Altsys still retained all rights to FreeHand. Despite brief plans to keep it in-house to sell it along with Fontographer and Virtuoso,[12] Altsys reached an agreement with the multimedia software company, Macromedia, to be acquired. This mutual agreement provided FreeHand and Fontographer a new home with ample resources for marketing, sales, and competition against the newly merged Adobe-Aldus company. Altsys would remain in Richardson, Texas but would be renamed as the Digital Arts Group of Macromedia and was responsible for the continued development of FreeHand. Macromedia received FreeHand’s 200,000 customers and expanded its traditional product line of multimedia graphics software to illustration and design graphics software.[13] CEO James Von Ehr became a Macromedia vice-president until 1997 when he left to start another venture.

FreeHand 7.0 sold for $399 in 1996, or $449 as part of the FreeHand Graphics Studio (see above.) Features included a redesigned user interface that allowed recombining Inspectors, Panel Tabs, Dockable Panels, Smart Cursors, Drag and Drop with Adobe applications and QuarkXPress, Graphic Search and Replace, Java (programming language) and AppleScript Automation, Chart creation, and new Effects tools and functions. Shockwave was introduced to leverage graphics for the Web.

FreeHand 10.0 sold for $399 in 2000 or $799 as part of the Studio MX bundle. Macromedia released this as Carbonized for both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. It shared a common Macromedia GUI Interface and several tools were added or renamed to match Flash tools. New features include Brushes, Master Pages, Print Area, and a Navigation Panel for adding links, names, and adding actions or notes to objects. Also “Smart cursor” Pen and Bezigon Tools and a Contour Gradient Fill.