I am looking into purchasing Adobe Illustrator 10 for some vector graphics work. Since it is a very expensive program, I just want to get everyone's feelings on the program, and how it runs in OS X 10.2. etc. Thanks!
Adobe Illustrator lets me buy my gas and my clothes and my food, hence I'm a pretty big fan of the application. I upgrade on a regular basis, but have tried to make myself wait 6 months after a new revision is introduced before I install it so that the major bug fixes have been introduced.
As far as the application itself goes, I run all Adobe apps. I would recommend that you at least give both Illustrator and Freehand a tryout to see which of them makes more sense to you. I prefer the interoperability between my Adobe apps and find that the conventions used by Adobe between its applications is moving toward unification, so if you're planning on learning, my own biased advice is to go Illustrator.
In OS X 10.2 I've had few problems. There ARE some still a few bugs, but truly few. For instance there are many times that when I quit the application that the OS comes back to inform me that Illustrator has unexpectedly quit. There may in fact be a fix out there for this one. Another more frustrating bug is that when you hook up to PC's on a network via SMB that you lose control of some of your modifier keys (for instance the shift key doesn't constrain the scaling of objects).
I hope that you get it and that you learn to use it well, it's never a boring experience to build graphics!
If you're running OSX, definitely go with Illustrator. I've been a Freehand user since Aldus owned it, and I can say without hesitation that the Freehand 10 experience on OSX is miserable. Sad, but true.
<strong>Adobe Illustrator lets me buy my gas and my clothes and my food, hence I'm a pretty big fan of the application. I upgrade on a regular basis, but have tried to make myself wait 6 months after a new revision is introduced before I install it so that the major bug fixes have been introduced.
As far as the application itself goes, I run all Adobe apps. I would recommend that you at least give both Illustrator and Freehand a tryout to see which of them makes more sense to you. I prefer the interoperability between my Adobe apps and find that the conventions used by Adobe between its applications is moving toward unification, so if you're planning on learning, my own biased advice is to go Illustrator.
In OS X 10.2 I've had few problems. There ARE some still a few bugs, but truly few. For instance there are many times that when I quit the application that the OS comes back to inform me that Illustrator has unexpectedly quit. There may in fact be a fix out there for this one. Another more frustrating bug is that when you hook up to PC's on a network via SMB that you lose control of some of your modifier keys (for instance the shift key doesn't constrain the scaling of objects).
I hope that you get it and that you learn to use it well, it's never a boring experience to build graphics!
D</strong><hr></blockquote>
Sounds pretty good. I have used Adobe Photoshop and been very please with it. I don't like Macromedia products on the Mac, for some reason they feel strange when compared to my windows version. Anyways, I have used Freehand on the Windows computer, and I didn't like it that much.
Thanks 709, I want a program which runs well in OS X natively, like Illustrator 10.
I am going to purchase Adobe Illustrator 10 tonight!
Gone back to running version 8 in Classic (not OS9, but Classic). Runs circles around version 10 in OSX. Running v10 is a miserable experience, but we work with big files.
Virtual Memory is Hard Drive space that an operating system allocates as memory when you don't have enough actual memory. It's not a good thing because your hard drive is considerably slower than RAM. You're always better off having large amounts of RAM, as opposed to using Virtual Memory.
I'm using Illustrator 10 on a 1GHZ TiBook with 1GB of RAM. Working on 1 megabyte+ files, with lots of objects, is painfully slow. Simple things like save, selecting layers and objects can be up to 800% slower than Illustrator 8.
Yes, I have complained to Adobe. But it is real stable
Virtual Memory is Hard Drive space that an operating system allocates as memory when you don't have enough actual memory. It's not a good thing because your hard drive is considerably slower than RAM. You're always better off having large amounts of RAM, as opposed to using Virtual Memory.</strong><hr></blockquote>
How do I know if it's on though? I was reading that it is always on. B/C some programs say I need virtual memory on. Or can I just ignore that?
[ 01-27-2003: Message edited by: Mac Man 020581 ]</p>
My understanding is that OS X dynamically allocates RAM between active apps. I recommend getting an additional hard drive and using it as a scratch disk. They're cheap and I've found that my external firewire drive is faster than the internal HD in my 600Mhz iBook.....of course, it only has about 1GB of free room left on it. In a day or so I'll have handed off a lot of project files and will make some more room.
One thing I like about Freehand is its ability to build multiple pages. I suppose if I want that flexibility I should upgrade my PageMaker up to InDesign.
More than anything I need to find an OS X solution to what Adobe Streamline does for me. I hate cranking up OS 9 inside of X just to run that antiquated app!
Comments
As far as the application itself goes, I run all Adobe apps. I would recommend that you at least give both Illustrator and Freehand a tryout to see which of them makes more sense to you. I prefer the interoperability between my Adobe apps and find that the conventions used by Adobe between its applications is moving toward unification, so if you're planning on learning, my own biased advice is to go Illustrator.
In OS X 10.2 I've had few problems. There ARE some still a few bugs, but truly few. For instance there are many times that when I quit the application that the OS comes back to inform me that Illustrator has unexpectedly quit. There may in fact be a fix out there for this one. Another more frustrating bug is that when you hook up to PC's on a network via SMB that you lose control of some of your modifier keys (for instance the shift key doesn't constrain the scaling of objects).
I hope that you get it and that you learn to use it well, it's never a boring experience to build graphics!
D
<strong>Adobe Illustrator lets me buy my gas and my clothes and my food, hence I'm a pretty big fan of the application. I upgrade on a regular basis, but have tried to make myself wait 6 months after a new revision is introduced before I install it so that the major bug fixes have been introduced.
As far as the application itself goes, I run all Adobe apps. I would recommend that you at least give both Illustrator and Freehand a tryout to see which of them makes more sense to you. I prefer the interoperability between my Adobe apps and find that the conventions used by Adobe between its applications is moving toward unification, so if you're planning on learning, my own biased advice is to go Illustrator.
In OS X 10.2 I've had few problems. There ARE some still a few bugs, but truly few. For instance there are many times that when I quit the application that the OS comes back to inform me that Illustrator has unexpectedly quit. There may in fact be a fix out there for this one. Another more frustrating bug is that when you hook up to PC's on a network via SMB that you lose control of some of your modifier keys (for instance the shift key doesn't constrain the scaling of objects).
I hope that you get it and that you learn to use it well, it's never a boring experience to build graphics!
D</strong><hr></blockquote>
Sounds pretty good. I have used Adobe Photoshop and been very please with it. I don't like Macromedia products on the Mac, for some reason they feel strange when compared to my windows version. Anyways, I have used Freehand on the Windows computer, and I didn't like it that much.
Thanks 709, I want a program which runs well in OS X natively, like Illustrator 10.
I am going to purchase Adobe Illustrator 10 tonight!
freehand for laying out and print work
illustrator for illustrating and screen work (anti-alasing nicer and makes pdf's better)
freehand really needs updating, wait for MX
I run it on a Powerbook G4/667with 512 ram, and it works great. No complaints.
<strong>Depends on the speed of you computer as well. A friend of mine had a G3/350, using OS X. THat was a pretty miserable experience for him.
I run it on a Powerbook G4/667with 512 ram, and it works great. No complaints.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Well that really goes for everything.
What is virtual memory? How do I know if it on?
I think the latest version of Illustrator is something like 10.0.3 (pretty sure that's it).
If you use Photoshop (or other Adobe products), you'll feel comfortable and on "recognizable ground" in Illustrator.
Many people swear by Freehand, and those two seem to be the major vector illustration apps, constantly duking it out.
You can download those tryout version of each. I know you can with Illustrator. Probably with Freehand as well?
Virtual Memory is Hard Drive space that an operating system allocates as memory when you don't have enough actual memory. It's not a good thing because your hard drive is considerably slower than RAM. You're always better off having large amounts of RAM, as opposed to using Virtual Memory.
Yes, I have complained to Adobe. But it is real stable
[ 01-27-2003: Message edited by: cowerd ]</p>
<strong>Mac Man,
Virtual Memory is Hard Drive space that an operating system allocates as memory when you don't have enough actual memory. It's not a good thing because your hard drive is considerably slower than RAM. You're always better off having large amounts of RAM, as opposed to using Virtual Memory.</strong><hr></blockquote>
How do I know if it's on though? I was reading that it is always on. B/C some programs say I need virtual memory on. Or can I just ignore that?
[ 01-27-2003: Message edited by: Mac Man 020581 ]</p>
One thing I like about Freehand is its ability to build multiple pages. I suppose if I want that flexibility I should upgrade my PageMaker up to InDesign.
More than anything I need to find an OS X solution to what Adobe Streamline does for me. I hate cranking up OS 9 inside of X just to run that antiquated app!
D
Photshop for rasters
and inDesign to put it all together.
buy illustrator if you are eventually going to get inDesign. Great integration.