Ah, Freehand! I remember a time when I used and taught Illustrator, Freehand, and CorelDraw. I preferred both Freehand and CorelDraw over Illustrator then, and still feel Illustrator is somewhat clunky in use, and rather prefer to use alternatives. As for Fireworks: it would be great if Adobe would decide to remove the licensing/activation from Fireworks and just allow existing FW users to unlock their Fireworks installation for as long as it runs on their machine(s). You @B i r n o u and I probably agree that that is never going to happen for various reasons, including ones I listed in an earlier post in this thread. Photopea is great for conversion, but nothing beats having access to Fireworks directly, of course. So in my case I decided to move forward a while ago with a 'portable' version, since my ethics do not clash with myself running a patched version of Fireworks whilst I pay for the entire Creative Suite. It works perfectly, no issues, doesn't require activation, and therefore solves all problems for myself. Trusting Adobe to solve this for Fireworks users is admirable, but hardly realistic 😉 I agree with you that Fireworks does feature a number of things that I haven't seen anywhere else, and sometimes I do miss (for example) the full-screen/document optimization tab... Would love to see that in other software. And how recyclable layers work in Fireworks is quite nice as well. For my freelance and personal work a combo of PhotoLine, a lineup of plugins, and Krita/Figma replace Fireworks, and feature functionality that far surpasses Fireworks (expected since times have moved on). But I will always look back at my time with Fireworks and Freehand with a feeling of fondness.
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