However, by 2013, Stagestack developer Quasado determined that continued development was not financially viable. Some FFO members supported a project called Stagestack in the hopes that an open source alternative would be possible. The source code to FreeHand, in Adobe's possession, was never released. Members could request discounts for Adobe products. Adobe agreed to work with the community to investigate adjustment of Adobe Illustrator's feature set to meet user requests. Around the time the case entered into final mediation in May 2012, FFO had over 6500 members.

District Judge Lucy Koh dismissed portions of the case, but denied a motion by Adobe to dismiss it in its entirety. In 2011, a civil antitrust case was filed against Adobe. The Mac version of FreeHand MX will not run on OS X 10.7 or later due to its use of legacy PowerPC code.Ī group of dedicated FreeHand users formed the Free FreeHand Organization (FFO) in an attempt to pressure Adobe Systems to divest FreeHand after its acquisition of Macromedia. Technical support for the last version of FreeHand MX (11.0.2) ended on August 1, 2011. Migration guides and upgrades to Adobe Illustrator CS3 were offered to existing users of FreeHand. In May 2007, Adobe announced that FreeHand would no longer be updated.

Īfter Macromedia was acquired by Adobe in December 2005, work on maintenance updates was transitioned to Adobe India. Prior to that, the engineers rushed to add many new features to FreeHand MX with the expectation that it might be the last version that they would ever work on. In 2003, most of the development team in Texas were laid off, with some relocating to Macromedia's main office in San Francisco. Development įreeHand MX was developed in Richardson, Texas by Macromedia's Digital Arts Group, formerly Altsys, the original creators of FreeHand. FreeHand MX also installs readers for Macromedia Flash MX and Fireworks MX, which allows those applications to import FreeHand MX files. An older version of FreeHand is required to convert files from FreeHand 3 or earlier. FreeHand MX can open files from Aldus FreeHand 4 or later.

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