web effects

When I read the reviews and viewed the feature-list of Freehand MX, I was hesitant to upgrade from 10.0.1 to MX. However since I lauded the 10.x interface, and the new product shared the interface of the MX family, I did the upgrade. I know this is a touchy subject for some as they either love the new MX interface or they hate it. Some new features like contour gradients, 3D extrusions, live effects were a good bonus. Basically doing anything in Freehand MX took much less time than previous versions or competing products. My main problem was exporting these images. PNG export was terrible, creating artifacts over the image where I used live effects. I tried importing into Fireworks MX and Flash MX, but the results were unimpressive. It took me a while to figure out that this upgrade added two executables in the Freehand MX folder to upgrade Fireworks MX and Flash MX for handle Freehand MX files. The problem with that, is that a complex image created in Freehand using the new live effects or contour fills is not converted into blends for proper rendering by Fireworks, rather contours are replaced by radials, and the whole colour scale of the gradients seem shifted. If they tell you there is full compatibility among with Macromedia Studio MX product family now, they've lied to you. Macromedia's Freehand MX message board is a good place to read about the new features and bugs in MX to figure out if this upgrade is right for you. If your image lives and dies within MX, and you don't need to export it to another application, it's wonderful -- and for 99.99% of us that is not the case. Don't throw away your old CDs yet. Freehand is improving, but it is far from perfect. Try again Macromedia!

UPDATE (13/09/03), Macromedia has listened to the cries of their customers and released a free updater of Freehand MX, now (11.0.1), aka Freehand MX2004. This updater solves MANY of the problems originally identified with Freehand MX. It should be noted that support for MacOS9 and Windows NT and Me have been dropped from this updated version. The trial version available online is still the buggy original MX version, and the boxed versions will include the buggy version for unsuspecting NT, Me and OS9 users who want to use Freehand MX. The update will be available online for registered customers and as a part of Studio MX 2004.