We need you now!

If you did not do so already, then please fill in the registration form as a part of our lawsuit against Adob.. Now is the time you can really show how much you care about FreeHand!

Our Antitrust Lawsuit:
What’s the latest?

With this new year, Free FreeHand moves forward into the next phase of court proceedings. If you have been following our Twitter news, many of you are aware of the events from the past months where Adobe filed a Motion to Dismiss against our lawsuit. http://www.freefreehand.org/ffh_newsletter15.html

After hearing arguments from both sides on November 10, the Judge’s order rejected Adobe’s Motion to Dismiss. This was a MAJOR stepping stone clearing the way ahead for FreeHand; it means we are now going to trial.

United States District Judge, Lucy Koh, issued a Case Management Order which schedules the proceedings for the year up to the Jury Trial. Among other items, this includes such areas as:
· Discovery Plan
· Expert Reports
· Rebuttal of Expert Reports
· Jury Trial
http://www.freefreehand.org/images/Adobes-Motion-to-Dismiss.pdf

Free FreeHand is presently into the Discovery phase. As described in Wikipedia, this is where “each party, through the law of civil procedure, can obtain evidence from the opposing party by means of discovery devices including requests for answers to interrogatories, requests for production of documents, requests for admissions and depositions.” Free FreeHand’s gathering of information, users experiences, survey statistics, members FH licenses (as asked for above) and communications will be presented to Adobe. In return, the discovery process allows us to request Adobe files, documents, and depositions.

Whether you are a part of our organization or not, FreeHand users can feel that true progress has been made toward our goal of a “free” FreeHand.

Creating a new application

The lawsuit is not the only thing going on right now. A team of developers is working on a new vector graphics application with their goal to create something that feels familiar to FreeHand users. Their application has been in the making for quite some time and the core is CMYK capable and ready to draw vector paths. They are currently adding color filling capabilities and will issue a Mac and Windows early beta version for us to try – we will inform you about the details as we hear back from them.

They also welcome your input about the most needed features you want in this survey.

Illustrator Blues

When Adobe officially announced the end of FreeHand development in 2007, they released their FreeHand to Illustrator Migration Guides which contained these statements:

“Your experience using FreeHand gives you a good foundation for moving to Illustrator.” and, “Your experience in FreeHand will get you up-to-speed very rapidly” in Illustrator.

It seems from their point of view that migrating to Illustrator would be relatively painless for FreeHand users but, unfortunately, the vast majority of users we hear from often say something quite different. Florida’s Daytona Trophy had full intentions to successfully transition the company to Adobe Illustrator but as owner, Stuart Sargeant, wrote in the FreeHand Discussion List, it didn’t go quite as planned:

Hello All,

Last year I decided to move our company from Freehand to Illustrator after a long and wonderful FH relationship. We have 3 artists that were using Mac Quad G5's and FH11.02.

We required everyone to view and digest the "Migrating from Freehand to Illustrator" videos that appeared on Lynda.com. (Shortly after the training videos of Freehand disappeared). We also required them to view ALL of the Illustrator videos. We bought new intel Mac Pro's with Snow Leopard and said goodbye to FH in native format, assuming that Illustrator would bring us to bigger and better things.

Needless to say this was a complete disaster. One of the artists said that is was if he was speaking English all of his life and all of a sudden he was required to speak Icelandic. Our production came to a crawl. One of the artists jumped ship and production fell so badly we had to send some art to an outside source (using Freehand) just to keep up.

Here we are one year later...... I've brought back the quad g5's, loaded them with OSX 10.4 Tiger, a lot of memory and installed FH11.02 (we own 5 licenses). I feel like jumping in the air and clicking my feet. (If I wasn't so damned old).

I realize that I'm "preaching to the choir" here, but my purpose in this rambling is as follows: If you or your company management is considering drinking the Adobe Cool Aid and migrating from FH to Illustrator, stop now and throughly reconsider.

BTW... Charles Syrett's analogy of the Freehand/Illustrator car is excellent. I wish the Adobe CEO could read it...

Cheers
Stuart
http://DaytonaTrophy.com

Do you need
a faster Mac soon?

The above story brings us to another theme: You do not necessarily need to stick with old hardware! We want the newest Mac computer, but we also need to use FreeHand. Now since Apple delivers their newest machines with Lion, and FreeHand does not run on Lion anymore, we have exactly that problem we have seen coming when we started FreeFreeHand in September 2009 (when it became sure that FreeHand will not be upgraded anymore).

As you may know, in Lion it is the absence of Rosetta, which made it impossible to run PPC applications, like FreeHand MX, on an Intel Mac. Some have succeeded to install Snow Leopard, the last OS X version FreeHand works on, on a new 2011 Mac Mini. It is not quiet easy, but it is possible. Nevertheless, that solution is useless, because it gets the new machines slowed down by at least 30%. Running a Windows version of FreeHand in a Windows emulator on Lion is possible, but also not an elegant or easy solution. It seems, best for now is to get the latest Mac Pro in its most powerful configuration on Snow Leopard and you may be good for the next couple years.

However, if this is not good enough, you may like to hear about another alternative. The German company PearC offers Mac clones which are up to date or even better as current Macs. We asked them specifically about clones which do support Snow Leopard and they explained, as long as they can buy the necessary Snow Leopard install DVD, they can deliver their clones running Snow Leopard.

Currently all their models based on 1366 processor sockets (Intel Core i7, Intel Xeon Nehalem) can also run Snow Leopard. At the moment this includes their PearC Professional, PearC Expert and PearC Supreme. They say, if it generates large amounts of requests, they may get Snow Leopard running even on following, newer sockets like the 1155 (Sandy Bridge).

The PearC concept is legal in Germany and they usually deliver within Europe (other countries on request).
http://www.pearc.de

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