If you’ve ever found yourself wishing your vector drawing program worked with your brain for a change, you definitely want to check out FreeHand 8. With FreeHand 8, you can easily create many awesome effects that in other drawing programs require lots of Bezier point twiddling, duplicating, and calculating. The program’s new features are powerful and intuitive — Macromedia clearly went to great lengths to help artists focus on art rather than the program.
Lens fills, probably the splashiest of FreeHand’s new features, let you create effects previously available only in raster-image editors such as Photoshop and Painter. Use the transparency fill, for example, to make an assigned section of your drawing appear see-through. Other Lens fills lighten, darken, invert, and magnify objects. The astounding thing about Lens fills is that they work on and with vector objects, and the objects remain editable in vector format.
There’s one thing to keep in mind when you’re working with Lens fills: each fill creates duplicates of its underlying objects and contains the duplicates. This means if you start layering Lens fills, your file size can balloon quickly.
The Freeform and Reshaping tools are also fun and work intuitively. How many times have you wanted to sculpt a section of a vector object, and your only option was to edit it point by point, fighting with handle after handle? The Freeform and Reshaping tools allow you to push and pull portions of a vector object until you get the shape you want, almost as if you were molding clay. With these new tools, you spend a lot less time twiddling and more time being creative.
The new Graphic Hose feature allows you to spray vector images into your documents. Squirt a single logo into your layout or spray a border of logos around a page or ad. This feature is a kick to use and easy to learn.
Macromedia has built flexibility into FreeHand 8. You can save, name, and view up to eight custom versions of a document, as well as customize both toolbars and keyboard shortcuts. You can also combine panels (most other programs call them palettes), snap-align them to each other, or dock them together — and most are resizable. FreeHand now offers keyboard short-cut sets from other popular graphics and publishing programs, including Adobe Illustrator 6 and 7 and CorelDraw 6. If you don’t like the shortcut sets provided, you can assign custom shortcuts.
Note, however, that the behavior of some menu commands changes when you use another program’s shortcut set. Typing the shortcut assigned to some commands results in a different outcome than using the mouse to choose the same commands from the menu. The customizable shortcuts feature may not be perfect yet, but it’s way better than anything Adobe and Quark currendy offer. We also experienced intermittent display problems with floating panels that dropped behind other floating panels and toolbars when clicked. To select the correct one, we had to click the one that was in the way — floating on top — and the desired one became accessible.
Other new FreeHand 8 features allow you to create several styles of drop shadows and emboss effects for vector objects. The new Mirror tool allows you to create complex circular patterns and symmetrical objects quickly and intuitively, and you can rasterize vector images in place with less RAM than previous versions required — eliminating the need to export your artwork to Photoshop.
FreeHand 8 now exports to Shockwave Flash 2 movie format, and imports and exports lots of other new file formats. (We must note that elements sometimes dropped from the illustration when we exported to PDF. To be on the safe side, it’s probably best to stick with Adobe’s Distiller for PDF.) With the Insta.HTML program that ships with the full Design in Motion suite, you can also export FreeHand pages to HTML. Insta.HTML is, for HTML pros, a handy tool for quick mock-ups of Web pages; for print desipers beginning to dive into the Web, it’s an easy way to get your feet wet.
Although there are odd display glitches that need to be fixed, we’ve so far not found flaws that make us want to give up all the awesome new features and performance enhancements of FreeHand 8. With this version, FreeHand leaps way beyond the competition.
Chapman, Elyse. (June 1998). FreeHand 8. MacAddict. (pgs. 40-41).
Macromedia, Inc.
Applications
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2014-04-14 / 
98dc4732d4b2f825272e2d1084d2064471a8769a / 
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freehand8.0.1bupdate_0.hqx
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
