Legal Notice: I found some available serial numbers in SIT Image so I could proceed the installation. And the software is kind of running in AUTHORIZED STATUS.
The rivalry between Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia FreeHand is right up there with King Kong and Godzilla or the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. Recently, Macromedia stole Adobe’s thunder by coming to market quicker with rev 9 of its vector-drawing software. But with the release of Illustrator 9, Adobe delivers a knockout punch, including transparency and Web-focused features that just may change the way we think about vector illustration programs.
We had Illustrator 9 up and running on our tangerine iBook in no time. It’s a good thing we added that extra RAM, because Illustrator likes a lot of it (64MB, to be exact), and that’s without getting into the heavy stuff. Illustrator ran more comfortably on our “serious” work machine, a 400MHz blue-and-white G3 with 384MB of RAM. It turns out that the app needs all of that RAM to give us what illustrators around the world have been asking for since the beginning of Macintosh time — transparency. FreeHand users will claim they’ve had transparency since version 8 via Lens Effects, but FreeHand offers the $10-Rolex-you-bought-on-37th-Street kind of transparency. Illustrator is the real thing because transparency isn’t simply an effect you apply, but rather an integral part of the program.
To start, you can control how see-through an object is via the opacity slider in the new Transparency palette. You can also apply different blending modes (multiply, lighten, luminosity, and so on) just as in Photoshop, but Illustrator takes it all a step further by allowing you to apply these settings to any kind of object, group, or layer — even placed images, gradients, patterns, or brushes.
Turns out Illustrator has a soft side to it. How many times have you wanted to give a vector object a soft, feathered edge? Illustrator’s new Live Effects lets you feather edges, apply soft drop shadows, and use other Photoshop filters such as Gaussian Blur. And it’s all live, meaning you can change the settings of your effects at any time without losing detail.
The Appearance palette (yes, another palette — Illustrator has 24 of them now) is where you can take control of live effects by combining and arranging several different effects on a single object. For example, with the Live Shape effect you can create shapes that grow automatically to fit text (great for making Web navigation buttons). Also, you can now assign multiple-stroke and multiple-fill attributes to single objects. Once you’ve applied effects and attributes to an object, you can define it as a style and apply it to any other object via Illustrator’s new Object Styles palette.
If you use masks often, you’ll be happy to know that Illustrator 9 can apply transparent effects on masks as well using a feature called an Opacity Mask. This allows you to use levels of gray to define a mask, enabling you to give photos soft edges... Another kind of mask, a Layer Clipping Mask, allows the top-most object on a layer to become a mask for all objects and sublayers beneath it.
Speaking of layers, Illustrator 9 introduces nested layers — the ability to put sub-layers within a layer. Hiding a layer hides any sublayers within it, and a layer mask will also mask objects on sublayers beneath it. Since you can apply live effects and transparency to a layer itself, simply dragging a sublayer into another layer can change its appearance.
In addition, Illustrator 9 boasts greater compatibility with Photoshop. While version 8 introduced the ability to export layers into Photoshop, version 9 lets you export editable text (if it’s on its own layer) into Photoshop. Photoshop will also recognize Illustrator’s transparency settings.
Playing catch-up with FreeHand, Illustrator adds features like a lasso selection tool, a Simplify command to reduce the number of points on a path, and customizable keyboard shortcuts for almost any tool or menu command. Illustrator still lacks support for multiple pages, required for preparing multipage PDF documents. This omission is surprising given that Illustrator’s native format is actually PDF-based. Necessary to support transparency, this format makes for larger file sizes; however, with Apple’s Quartz technology on the horizon in OS X, PDF looks like the direction of the future.
If you’re a print designer, chances are you’ve had to handle trapping issues. Illustrator 9 introduces a new preview mode called Overprint Preview, which allows you to view your traps and overprints onscreen. If you’re a Web designer, Adobe hasn’t forgotten about you, either. Another view mode called Pixel Preview gives you the option to face the cold, hard truth about how your art will look rendered on a computer screen...
In fact, Illustrator’s stack of Web features will please dot-com designers. With support for hexadecimal Web-safe colors, you can specify and search for colors by their hex code — a far more intuitive method than scrolling through an entire list as you must do in FreeHand. Illustrator 9 also supports the export of scalable vector graphics (SVG), an emerging Web technology, as well as Macromedia’s Hash format (SWF). A Release To Layers feature gives you the abifity to convert text strings and blends to individual layers for export as Flash frames, files, or even symbols.
8 introduced the ability to export layers into Photoshop, version 9 lets you export editable text (if it’s on its own layer) into Photoshop. Photoshop will also recognize Illustrator’s transparency settings.
Playing catch-up with FreeHand, Illustrator adds features like a lasso selection tool, a Simplify command to reduce the number of points on a path, and customizable keyboard shortcuts for almost any tool or menu command. Illustrator still lacks support for multiple pages, required for preparing multipage PDF documents. This omission is surprising given that Illustrator’s native format is actually PDF-based. Necessary to support transparency, this format makes for larger file sizes; however, with Apple’s Quartz technology on the horizon in OS X, PDF looks like the direction of the future.
One of the biggest challenges in creating art for the Web is maximizing quality while minimizing file size. FreeHand 9 introduced automatic optimization for Web export, but Illustrator’s Save As Web feature is better. It allows you to view up to four versions of your image simultaneously so you can optimize your file until it’s just right. FreeHand won’t even give you a preview. Illustrator also provides useful feedback, like color tables (the exact colors used in the file) and approximate download speeds on different modems.
You pay a price for all this functionality (especially transparency), and that’s speed. Illustrator 9 is significantly slower than version 8. How much you care about the performance drop depends on how important transparency and other new features are to you. We found that disabling layer thumbnails and not working in Overprint Preview mode helped speed things up. Another annoyance is the black-and-white software manual, which made some concepts like blending modes difficult to understand. We found Illustrator’s HTML- based help system awkward to use, but Adobe offered some helpful tutorials on its Web site... Curiously, we found that Illustrator 9 files saved in EPS format had poor previews in QuarkXPress and InDesign, compared to the same files saved from Illustrator 8.
Illustrator 9 maintains the smooth, intuitive interface found in all Adobe applications, and learning to use the new features is fairly easy. Today’s design trends demand cool transparent effects (as seen on Apple’s Web site and in the OS X Aqua interface), and currently no tool out there can do it better than Illustrator. You’ll find enough features and improvements in Illustrator 9 to justify the cost of the upgrade even if you specialize solely in either Web or print design. And if you do both, your dreams just came true.
Golding, Mordy. (September 2000). Illustrator 9. MacAddict. (pgs. 48-50).
Adobe Illustrator 9
Adobe Systems, Inc.
Applications
out of 10 (1 vote)
637 / 
2014-09-29 / 
408a2dea048bef264859df85526d6f81f2db21c2 / 
/ 
from MediaFire
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
