It has a full history of FreeHand, a table of all versions with icons, references to magazine reviews and news 1988-Present, and its current situation. Also a new graphic of FreeHand's GUI:
300px-Macromedia_Freehand_screenshot.png (85.17 KiB) Viewed 11576 times
Wow - all those icons from previous renditions of the app make me feel quite nostalgic! I joined the FreeHand community properly at version 3.0. What about everyone else?
I learned it without a manual. My employers had conveniently lost the books and stuff from the box.
At around the same time, I had to get someone to show me how to duplicate something in Illustrator 88. Simple when you know how, but I couldn't figure it out...
Me too - No manual was available because I lied and told an employer that I knew how to use the software, just to get the job! It just goes to show how intuitive FreeHand was (and still is); I had very little knowledge of Macs at the time, let alone FreeHand as an application and I managed to fluff my way through the first few weeks with no major hiccups - and even managed to design some cool record sleeves too!
FreeHand 3 was my first version as well. I bought it around the time of using a Mac IIci and I still have the box, manual, and floppies. I used it mostly doing educational art and packaging design and as I recall, the concept of vector art versus raster art was the biggest hurdle in my head. It took a while to grok what Photoshop 2 and FreeHand 3 did differently and why printers were so vocal about which files to send.
I installed FH3 again (in Sheep Shaver) when doing research for the Wikipedia page and it brings back some old memories. The simplicity of the software compared to MX is really amusing yet it all works the same. Here is a screen shot I took this morning with a 1992 job and the 3.1 splash screen.
