My favorite (cough) thing about Quark was having to use Rosetta on my Mac to run it in a virtual OS 9 environment, because Quark refused for many years to even bother coming out with a version for OS X, even telling Mac users that they should switch to Windows if they wanted the newest version.
I also have a memory of a very nice fellow from Quark giving a presentation to my workplace about a revolutionary new tool they’d developed that would let us do all of our website design in QuarkXPress and export it – WYSIWYG – to the web. It turned out that it basically exported the entire page as a flat image only viewable if you downloaded a special plugin. To say that Quark was a bit out of touch in the late 90s was putting it mildly.
Yeah. I was originally on board, but these days, where my income is staggeringly uneven at times, it’s turned out to be a hassle (and often a source of anxiety) to rent (especially since you can’t just switch it off at need).
I remain slightly bitter of their handling of mTropolis.
No love for CricketDraw? Access the “secret” menu for Transfer Functions, work a little dot-size and radial fountain effects magic, send it off to the LaserWriter Plus…and six to ten hours later the most amazing 300dpi page would emerge. (Yes, the final output was actually worth the wait…back in the day ; -)
Oh, those early halcyon days of DTP – CricketDraw, Freehand, Streamline, Fontographer, PageMaker, SuperPaint – when a Mac cost as much as a new VW (and twice as much for an LW+), and yet everybody ate well, paid their rent on time, and part of the daily work schedule was to put on a buzz and pore over every issue of High Frontiers/Reality Hackers. We wrote our code in Pascal and we liked it! (No we didn’t.)
The other cool thing about CricketDraw was the dual display – one side of the window showed the illustration; the other side showed the postscript code…begin the tweaking!
Still using Freehand MX.
Someone (can’t remember who) suggested that when Adobe bought out Macromedia they were going to merge them and call them “Frustrator”. Still makes me laugh.
I got a job at a quick copy shop (think paleokinkos) in the summer of ’88 and after playing with Illustrator and FreeHand for a few hours each, settled on the latter. I made a living with it and PageMaker (chosen over Quark by the same rigorous process) until I was made to convert a few years later in exchange for a steady paycheck cranking out real estate and tourism work.
I missed FreeHand for a couple years but I got used to my new reality and don’t truly remember what it was like relative to Illustrator. It would be fun to try it again after all these years. Maybe some day…
Not to be a buzzkill but software licenses are normally owned by individuals and companies (and are non transferable) - what you bought with that Craigslist purchase is no different to downloading a torrent until you pay Adobe for the privilege of using it.
I.e. you might as well just torrent the newest versions if you don’t have a valid license either way.
I’ve used it but not extensively because I only dabble in visual art. It works but it’s got some frustrating quirks.
For example, changing line width or color after you’ve drawn a line … May as well redraw the line instead. It’s been awhile so they may have fixed some of the issues.
I got frustrated enough I switched back to Inkscape even though it’s the Kludge From Hell on Mac. (At least it’s not Scribus, which is a piece of crap on any platform. Scribus: not even once.)
The reviews on the app store were glowing when I bought it so maybe it’s just me.
Back in 1995 I remember using Freehand to do a multi-color Christmas card for the union I belonged to. I tried printing it on my Epson color inkjet printer but the file size was just too big. So I separated out the color details and the black into two documents. I had no formal training at all, but was able to teach myself to trap the color behind the K document. I ran 100 pages through the inkjet printing only the colors. Then I loaded them back into the printer and ran them through printing the K. Worked perfect. The registration of that old printer was very tight. It wasn’t just that I was used to the Freehand tools, its interface truly was more intuitive. It’s too bad that Freehand’s intuitive interface couldn’t have been rolled into Illustrator.
