Mac Lions try Creator Express

[moonliner]

There's a well built Mac app that's about 2/3 of Freehand but feels familiar to use, has a great bezier tool, and some other cool features FH didn't have. It's called Creator Express and it's in the Mac app store. Grizzled veterans like me in the graphics field might remember MultiAd Creator, it's a descendent of that.

There are some frustrating things, like text converted to paths can't be separated further and manipulated, you can't simplify freehand-tool drawn lines except for one point at a time, no control over end shapes and junctions of lines (except for a few limited arrowheads), no calligraphic type capabilities, limited export, BUT the manual kerning tool is cool, I like the bezier tool even better than FH's, and there's some other great features too. The text wrap works great!

The best thing is, Creator Express is only $40 and there's a free, full-featured 30 day trial. And they have ACTUAL PEOPLE you can talk to on the phone for support and they answer emails too!!!! I'm hoping if some of us send them a friendly "hi" they might add our wish lists of features to this pretty cool program.

[FFH Mark]

I'm not familiar with this so took a look at the website http://www.multiad.com/products/creatorexpress.shtml . Although it is a big jump pricewise, the professional version of Creator looked most interesting and has a number of FreeHand features that the Express version doesn't. I'll have to check out a trial version of both.

That said, the main goal is to legally get FreeHand back and into development again and that is underway in court. So whether it is alternative software that is FreeHand-like or building a clone, these would be second choices to our goal of FreeHand itself. I say keep offering these ideas to the forum as you find them because f nothing else, it does offer competition to Adobe.

[FFH Thü]

Best thing about Creator Express is, it works in CMYK mode.

MultiAd Creator Pro goes for 500$.

Even in Creator Pro it seems a once created path object does not allow to edit its path points afterwards. At least I did not found out how. This makes it useless for me.