The normative force of events

[Matthias]

I think the phase of persuading and trying to convince Adobe is long over. In my opinion they now must be forced by law to give the FreeHand code to the community or sell it to talented developers like the pixelmator team or even Apple. So I think the time for a lawsuit has come. Do we have enough money to survive this?

[FFH Mark]

[Sally]

I cant help thinking that Quark would be a good company to approach, particularly this guy Raymond Schiavone who if you Google, seems to be winning with Quarkxpress 9 which is of course is Adobe Indesign competitor. I am sure they would love to have another product to rival Adobes Illustrator!

http://www.quark.com/About_Quark/Compan ... _Bios.aspx

[FFH Mark]

Sally, check out this forum topic about Quark and FreeHand:
http://forums.quark.com/t/23845.aspx

[Matthias]

Quark and FreeHand? Well, I don’t need Quark and I don’t want Quark to be a obligatory suite companion to FreeHand. Literally everyone I know who is still working with FreeHand (most of my collegues do, some quite talented folks in Frankfurt and here in Hamburg) uses FreeHand instead of a layout application. Me, too.

Publications with 100+ pages? No problem. Developing a corporate communications concept within one document including ads, brochures, web, you name it? This is how I work. The FreeHand advantage is to have one huge area to fool around with ideas and fragments, regardless whether they are on the ”layout“ side or on the ”vector“ side. Everything is part of the same idea or story and me and all my known collegues neither want to be forced to think sequentially and in spreads, which is what any layout application does, nor do we want an arbitrary line where we have to decide where vector art ends and where layout starts. To us this is contraproductive and contracreative. FreeHand is the only application without this ridiculous separation of line art and layout. That is why me and my friends need FreeHand – it suits at least our way of creative thinking and I strongly believe we are not alone.

On topic again: I am looking forward to May 1st and I really hope we sue FreeHand away from Adobe’s grasp. Dammit!

[Sally]

Had a quick look at the link Mark. I get the drift and had thought soon after posting here my last contribution that Adobe will not want to sell it.

What about opening a thread in the Illustrator Forum ..... Maybe a problem that Freehand can solve but which Illustrator cannot. Might gain some more recruits there!