FreeHand has had a long and distinguished career since it was first launched 15 years ago, but time has recently seemed to be catching up on it. While Macromedia concentrated its development efforts on its web-oriented MX applications, FreeHand was put on the back burner and fell seriously behind its main rivals, CorelDRAW and Illustrator. So is this latest release evidence of further decline or has FreeHand finally risen to the challenge?

One of the surest signs of FreeHand's age - and Macromedia's lack of interest - was the program's antiquated and unhelpful interface. That's no longer the case as the working environment has been given the full MX treatment with the previously free-floating palettes conveniently docked and arranged into collapsible panel groups. There are still occasional idiosyncracies such as the survival of the dedicated Halftones panel, but features such as the new shared Spell Checker and Answers panel help reinforce the cross-application MX identity and boost efficiency. 

The biggest boost comes from the new Object panel. This incorporates the functionality of the former Object, Fill, Stroke and Text Inspectors into one central panel for controlling everything about the appearance of your design elements. The way that FreeHand MX manages its formatting has also been radically overhauled. In particular objects can now support multiple attributes so that you can add more than one stroke and fill to your object. Each attribute is listed at the top of the Object panel and you can quickly format each in turn.

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