BigBack, I am ambigous about the future and fate of Freehand. I agree with squeakydave. Maybe Adobe will sell it, Freehand has been sold several times in its life. And this might be to its best. Macromedia has just spoiled this gem. It just can get better again.
Freehand has always been my favourite vector drawing and even layout tool, but from v.8 it has decreased slightly, too many bugs, unnecessary features, instability...
Compare the quality of freehand strokes, brushes in Freehand vs. Illustrator! Illustrators strokes are of much better quality, they follow the path much better and are smoother. And since most of the workflow continues in Photoshop or After Effects, Illustrator is better integrated, even in Flash (!).
Expression was always kind of a secret tip, but to be honest, I never managed to get good design out of it. Looked too... artificial. But it was quite handy for designing stroke-style logos.
I always thought "it would be cool if you could ANIMATE those strokes", and they had this as a project on their website which never left beta-stage. (And now I am here!
And of course I am a bit disappointed with these nice guys from Hongkong since they sold their souls to the empire of evil
Corel... errr. So maybe after all, they managed to make a good product, but since the Mac development has discontinued, I will not be able to tell.
Some kind of design I am doing in Flash, it is by far the fastest tool. Draw quickly, modify, paint and erase,... this way you can even do some vector-based frame-by-frame animation, if the budget allows...
Pixels: I use Photoshop a lot, of course, and Painter, though I still do not like its GUI. But since most of my work is based on comic style, most of my stuff is done vector-based, using a cintiq tablet.
But sometimes I STILL work on a light-table with punched paper.
