I mastered both FreeHand and Fireworks instead of Photoshop and Illustrator. Such bad luck. I loved them both. I remember the first time I bought he Macromedia Suite. It seemed so expensive to me at the time.
Flash, Fireworks, and FreeHand. I could probably still run circles in the MX versions just based on muscle memory.
“Adobe's tabbed palette, used throughout Adobe's products, are being copied by Macromedia® in many of its products, including Macromedia® Flash™ 5, Dreamweaver®, FreeHand® and Fireworks® software.”
Compare the infringing tabbed palettes of Flash 5 to the non-infringing (vertically-stacked) palettes of Flash MX:
I'm kind of surprised Apple didn't sue literally everyone for ripping off the MacPaint interface. I know they had the more general Look-and-feel lawsuit against MicroSoft, but they didn't seem to capitalize on Bill's great UI innovations.
Don't think they did it out of the goodness of their hearts.
Adobe and partially Microsoft were the only things keeping Apple alive in the early to late 90s.
Apple was cornered in the creative market, and even slowly failing at that. Antagonizing Adobe could have meant them pulling out of the Mac market and probably bankrupting Apple.
Microsoft had a deal to keep Office running on Macs, I think they got cash and Apple shares.
> Adobe and partially Microsoft were the only things keeping Apple alive in the early to late 90s.
They didn't do that out of pure goodness either. The Microsoft antitrust action began already in 1990 - many years before Windows 95 would enter the market... they needed Apple to be a viable alternative, simply to avoid being broken up. And Adobe didn't wish to be completely at the mercy of whatever Microsoft decided to do with their platform either.
this is weird revisionism .. Apple's dollar volume many multiples of Adobe. It was Adobe that was in scarcity mode. It was MSFT that was crushing things left and right. I think Apple behaved like predatory jerks in MSFT-envy at times, but the reality it complicated.
this is also spectacular revisionism .. multiple categories of desktop software appeared first on the Macintosh computer i.e. they were invented for mass production on the Macintosh. Photoshop is not the only one like that. What happened quickly was MSFT expanding with contractual license agreements into huge markets and making one of the founders into The World's Richest Man for more than twenty years without fail.
MSFT had a famous mistreatment of graphic designers or other commercial artists, in complete opposite to Apple where the creative people thought they were the center of the media world. Some people do not take visual arts, print or the like as anything but "toy", apparently. You are reading type right now.
At any rate, there is a saying that says something like "Washington DC, Los Angeles Hollywood, Silicon Valley -- they all have intense inner groups and they all think that they are the center of the world. Of course the world is bigger than that" MSFT delivered desktop computers to the world.
Fireworks was the best. Not compared to the crazy stuff Photoshop can do these days with 3D models and all that AI wizardry, but unlike Photoshop Fireworks could be used to draw box with a border using it's shape tool like Visio. I would use it to create web layouts for what would become DIVs in web design. And then there's Director, which was pretty powerful at the time they retired it. I think I still have a copy of the final version. Nothing beats that stacked timeline with scriptable frames and how it ultimately made it into Flash (formerly FutureSplash). Those were the days. I think I still have all the digital books for those products.
I very firmly feel that Aldus[!!!] FreeHand had the better vector drawing UX than Illustrator, and I still feel that way even though I've used Illustrator exclusively for the last 25 years
Affinity does 80% of what I need, though its interface for some things is very ...unique. But when I need that 80%... or even just the 1% of Illustrator that is "text on paths, done right", there I am, paying the rent to the feudal lords.
In college, my roommate was taking classes learning Freehand and Illustrator. Each version release would leapfrog the other product. Being industrious, I did all of my roommate's assignments on my own, and I learned the apps on his tuition. I didn't do his work for him. I just did it to learn. I was only able to do this because of a.b.m.a. I still use that knowledge from his classes on a daily basis.
Thanks for the pointer. Searching around the term Affinity Designer I found out that Belight, which makes other software I use (and are Ukrainian, double win) also make this, which I will try out. https://amadine.com/
Seemed like you always needed a trio of main apps. In the graphic design market of the 90s, it was Quark, Photoshop and Illustrator. To a lesser extent it was Pagemaker, Photoshop and Freehand.
This is very dependent on the country or language of your audience, but also Apple computers availability. In Israel, for example, FreeHand was by far the most popular tool for vector editing because of easier integration with right-to-left writing. Former Soviet Union countries almost exclusively relied on CorelDraw. Not sure why, but my guess is it was somehow easier to pirate it.
Pagemaker was always garbage compared to QuarkXPress or even Corel Ventura. But Adobe really improved on it with InDesign, and a lot of places I knew who used Quark promptly switched.
FreeHand was particularly useful because of its integration with Flash. A lot of animation shops would use FreeHand because it was a better editor than Flash, but then import drawings into Flash for animation.
Also, every one of the editors had sort of a recognizable style. Adobe Illustrator was perceived as being more "prestigious", "imported" and most people I knew at the time who used it were Mac users (which was expensive for an artist) so that also probably left a mark.
In general, professional/prosumer local desktop software has mostly collapsed into one (sometimes two) products per category and the categories themselves have become fairly rigidly defined. There's other more mainstream consumer packages but I'm guessing most of those are increasingly marginalized by open source and hosted services of various sorts.
Contrast today with when you probably had one or two dozen word processing programs with significant market share.
The only thing I remember about Quark is that Quark 4 seemed super outdated and old, but it's what the industry standardized on and Quark 5 totally bombed.
And the alien.
I was sure I was going to use PageMaker for 10 hours a day for the rest of my life but you learn a little HTML and you realized that I wasn't ever going to be the next David Carson (NO ONE would ever be the next David Carson) so f- it.
XRes was interesting, it would do all the imaging operations at reduced resolution to make them work quickly, and then when you saved the document it would perform all the actual work at full res. It sort of worked, but saving could appear to be really slow.
Nothing, really. I just abandoned 1:1 pixel design all together, because that's how I used Fireworks. I would do everything based on pixel ratios between objects. It kind of defined my art style since everything was geometric to some extent. Now I'll just sorta eyeball everything in Photoshop or Illustrator.
Affinity Designer seems to actually get kinda close to the OG Fireworks, at least on the surface, but I haven't really used it much, just casually played around with it.
I was so inspired by FreeHand that I spent many of my formative programming years trying to build a clone in Java with the new (at the time) Java 2D APIs. I remember being blown away at things like anti-aliasing in FreeHand and then Java 2D shipped and had anti-aliasing for shapes and paths and I felt so cool being able to achieve that look myself. I learned so much trying to clone it. R.I.P.
I'm not sure if folks remember this, but Macromedia's NLE avoided the fate of FreeHand and Fireworks thanks to Apple. The spirit of Macromedia lives on!
I was well-versed in Logic's origins at Emagic, but I had no idea FCP began as a Macromedia product in the 90s.
From saving Final Cut to delivering the death blow to Flash about twelve years later. Imagine the alternate history if Apple had acquired FreeHand and/or Fireworks around the time Macromedia was mulling a sale to Adobe!
I'm still saddened that during the FH/MX beta-testing and thereafter it wasn't possible for Macromedia to re-work Freehand as a native Cocoa app for Mac OS X.
Not that I'm an expert in any case--and I do serious video editing so seldom that I've always forgotten everything by the next time I need to do it--but FCP always clocked with me a lot better than Premiere for some reason even though I use Adobe for still photos.
This is interesting. I wonder what was the rationale for a design software company to develop their own programming language.
> As a technical aside, most versions of FreeHand (save the most recent ones) were written in a home grown language, that was humorously, and appropriately, called OOPS (Object Oriented Programming System). It was basically a preprocessor that generated C code that was then compiled to machine code.
In the late 80s lots of people were doing these OOP -> C things, often literally using the C preprocessor. The C++ compilers were still early (and most of them effectively preprocessors) and (as usual) not everybody agreed C++ was even the way to do OOP.
> In the late 80s lots of people were doing these OOP -> C things, often literally using the C preprocessor. The C++ compilers were still early (and most of them effectively preprocessors)
IIRC, some early C++ implementations were described (by their implementors) as C++ => C preprocessors.
True. Stroustrup's first implementation Cfront [1] was a C++ to C translator:
> Cfront was the original compiler for C++ (then known as "C with Classes") from around 1983, which converted C++ to C; developed by Bjarne Stroustrup at AT&T Bell Labs. The preprocessor did not understand all of the language and much of the code was written via translations.
cppfront [2] aims to do the same for translating C++ to C++:
> Cppfront is an experimental compiler from a potential C++ 'syntax 2' (Cpp2) to today's 'syntax 1' (Cpp1), to learn some things, prove out some concepts, and share some ideas.
The Panorama database (1) was written in something like PDP-11 code, running on a translation layer, from the very beginning until now (ish? I don't keep track of it). Meaning the author wrote translation layers for:
68K Macs running 16/32 bit not-32-bit clean MacOS
68K Macs running 32-bit clean
68K Macs running multitasking systems
PowerPC Macs running System 9
PowerPC Macs running MacOS X
Intel-chip Macs running 32-bit MacOS X
Intel-chip Macs running 64-bit MacOS X
(likely) M-chip Macs
That's a lot of translation! I only spoke with him about it back around 2002, but at the time he seemed satisfied with the solution, preferring it to rewriting the whole app every time Apple updated something.
AutoCAD is another great example of an application with a domain specific programming language that has provided an absolutely absurd amount of value over time.
Autolisp was built for AutoCAD but it wasn’t a fully custom language. It was mainly a subset of Lisp with a few custom hooks to connect to AutoCAD commands.
Around that time it was normal to have your own language if you were a big enough company. It made sense because "universal" languages were quite low quality (or there were commercial languages you had to buy). But, maybe there wasn't really much of thinking / planning put into it. It was just what everyone was doing. People sort of expected it. I think, mostly people thought about it as convenience, as in having all tools under your control...
I worked for two such companies, but it was already the time when having your own in-house language started to feel weird. I believe that both transitioned to using something generic quite a while ago.
That is different as it is a DSL, and it was supposed to be Adobe's core product. Also I don't think there were any off-the-shelf page description languages that they could use in 1982.
Developing a C++ alternative in 1988 is a different story.
DVI was created at that same time. I know some PostScript, but I don't know DVI, so it's hard for me to judge which one is better. DVI though, from the start, wasn't a commercial product, and, I believe, was also "open-source" (even though the term might not have been officially established).
Unfortunately (for DVI) Adobe started off by incorporating PostScript into printing hardware, so there was little reason for anyone in the printing industry to look for alternatives.
It was a huge let down though when Adobe decided to replace PS with PDF. It still kind of is. I think about PDF as being a missed opportunity. Too many things in this format have been poorly designed, and, on top of it, it's forced for the situations where it shouldn't be used (eg. storing official documents) which generates a lot of hate for the format.
Fell in love with Altsys Virtuoso on my NeXT Cube, then was relieved when Virtuoso 2 was ported to Mac OS and Windows as FreeHand 4, and used various versions of that all the way through beta-testing Freehand/MX and providing feedback on _Real World Freehand_ (which was one of the best ever computer books, and much of which was re-used as _Real World InDesign).
Still using it in Windows 11 on my Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 --- I just wish that there was a reasonable way to run FutureWave SmartSketch.
There have been a number of attempts to re-create it, most of which have stalled:
- GraviT
- Serif's Affinity Designer (I believe this actually opens FH/MX files)
It kills me that Adobe couldn't at least put all of Freehand's functionality into InDesign. Even so, I'd rather draw in ID than AI (which I've been using since v3.2 on a NeXT Cube and have never found very comfortable, despite the many FH features which it has copied).
I thought I was the only one who longed for Fireworks. Is there anything that comes close to it nowadays? It was so intuitive. (Also, thank you for your service to the graphics industry.)
>The death of Fireworks made me much much better at CSS, SVG, and HTML.
I barely used Fireworks, but primarily for the slicing of images into tables that was all the rage. I did use Dreamweaver and the Adobe app whose name is eluding me. One day I actually looked at the HTML/CSS from those apps, and it was not human readable at all. From that day forward, I started moving away from those apps and just wrote it by hand. So much less bloat. But I will admit, they were most definitely a nice set of training wheels to start the learning process.
FreeHand ironically allowed to draw shapes and illustrations so quickly and unhindered that it literally was as fast/productive/intuitive as using your ahem free hands.
I’d even say it was the only tool that allowed to beat free hands with only using the mouse and keystrokes.
I was at Macromedia when we purchased FreeHand, working in Tech Support.
After the merger Jim Von Ehr took the time to meet with the San Francisco team, because we would be taking tech support calls for FH. It's the only time I remember an upper management exec meeting with frontline tech support staff.
I too was a Macromedia user. I haven’t needed to use FreeHand, but I have Fireworks MX installed on my Fedora machine, since it runs perfectly under WINE.
Flash, Fireworks, and FreeHand. I could probably still run circles in the MX versions just based on muscle memory.