The end of FreeHand is written on the wall

Posted on 1 Jun 2006 at 10:36

Adobe has apparently confirmed that the FreeHand illustration application is to be discontinued.

Speaking at Adobe Live in Paris, Robert Raiola, Adobe's marketing director EMEA, said (French) that the company will continue to support the product for some time but all its efforts at the moment are concentrated on Illustrator 13, which will form part of the Creative Suite 3.

Raiola also confirmed the demise of the Web authoring application GoLive in favour of Dreamweaver, which, like FreeHand, it acquired with the purchase of rival firm Macromedia last year. Dreamweaver will replace GoLive in the Creative Suite.

Neither termination is unexpected. As soon as Adobe announced the Macromedia acquisition, most pundits predicted that Dreamweaver and Illustrator would prevail. In the interim FreeHand was dropped from the (Macromedia) Studio suite and Adobe published a guide for transferring documents to Illustrator.

There is no word yet on the future of Fireworks, Macromedia's image editing application, although its prospects do not look good. It is included in the Studio suite, but this collection is likely to be scrapped once Dreamweaver and Flash become fully fledged Adobe apps. Like FreeHand it is not listed under the main Products menu on the Adobe site.

In statement Adobe said that it plans to continue Freehand and GoLive development based on customer needs, but confirmed that its priorities lie elsewhere.

'Clearly Dreamweaver and Illustrator are market leading when it comes to Web design/development and vector graphics/illustration,' it said. 'Customers should expect Adobe to concentrate our development efforts around these two products with regards to future innovation and Creative Suite integration.'

Author: Simon Aughton

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