San Francisco, California-based Web publishing tools powerhouse Macromedia Inc has unveiled the latest incarnation of its graphic design application, Freehand 8. The company claims the new version has a more customizable graphical user interface, closer integration with other design applications, and new creative features. It boasts greater integration with Macromedia Flash, the company’s interactive animation design application (CI No 3,073), which aims to help designers to move work from print to the Web by exporting URL-linked illustrations and layout from Freehand in native Flash vector format. Users can customise the user interface and adopt shortcut keystroke sets from Adobe Photoshop, QuarkXPress, Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw and promises easier import and export of files between the key design applications. New creative features include a transparency Lens Fill that enables users to put translucent text over bitmaps to create a glass-like effect. There’s also a Magnify Lens for creating dynamic zoomed views for use in annotating technical illustrations. On the printing side, Macromedia is pushing a new Collect for Output feature which is designed to assemble document components such as fonts and images into a single folder for easier transfer to printshops. It’s also promising a feature for creating multi-page Portable Document Format files in Adobe Acrobat format. Freehand 8 will be available for Windows 95, Windows NT and Macintosh PowerPC in March for around $400, with upgrades of earlier versions available at $150. The company says it’ll also offer Freehand 8 at a special price of $200 for users of rival packages such as Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw. Freehand 8 will also be included as part of Macromedia’s Design in Motion suite which also includes Flash2 and a new version of Insta.HTML and will cost around $400. Upgrades from previous versions of Freehand will be priced at around $300.
