I know Adobe removed all support of FreeHand from CS6 Ai. Fine. But Adobe now needs to have a programmer design a simple droplet app they can offer as a FREE download on their site or as a FREE download to those who upgrade to Creative Cloud that allows former FreeHand users to still have access to their design archive moving forward.
The droplet would ignore any placed images or fonts and just strip out the vector content and spit out an .ai file the user could than open in Adobe Illustrator.
Seriously, how long would it take one of their programmers in India to do this? Maybe a week max? How much good will would that foster in the creative community? A lot!
I have one friend whose G5 mac is dying, he needs to buy a new iMac but discovered his FreeHand will no longer run on the new iMac. He knows he needs to switch to Ai and start using CS6 but he has 20+ years of vector art he can't simply abandon. He needs to be able to access it and for Adobe to give users the finger and not at least provide a means to convert art is a total BS move on their part. Adobe you need to work with these people. They're going to switch but you can't ask them to lay aside two decades of work because you won't create a simple droplet app to convert a file and give them access to their artwork.
I know another design firm in town whose whole system works with FreeHand, they have plugins to do specific forms of typography distortions (KPT Vector Effects) that even CS6 Ai sucks at and simply cannot even come close to doing well and yet Adobe expects these firms to just forget thousands of creative assets and abandon them because Adobe is too lazy to provide an easy means to convert files so they can at least transition with less pain when the move from FreeHand to CS6 Ai?
It's hard enough changing from FreeHand to Illustrator, add to that the fact Adobe now wants to prevent some users from being able to even access old FreeHand art and it's just adding needless insult to creative injury.
I made the switch back with CS2, but I still have 15 years worth of vector art I'd like to have access too. I don't want to have to keep CS5 on machine forever just to be able to use my old vector art because Adobe is too short sighted to provide a simple solution via a droplet app to convert them when needed.
I've attached a diagram that explains it as easy as I can. Come on Adobe, assign one programmer to this and get it done already this is a no-brainer. You bought FreeHand, you killed it, at least make it easier for those switching to access their old art in the new app they are using from you. (View larger image here)
