Adobe Acquiring Macromedia on December 3, 2005
dennison_uy writes "Adobe Systems Incorporated and Macromedia, Inc. today announced they have either received or been notified they will receive all regulatory clearances necessary to complete Adobe's pending acquisition of Macromedia. The companies expect to close the transaction on December 3, 2005. Does this mean the end for Fireworks and Freehand?"
FreeHand has been dead for a year now. The entire development team in Richardson. TX was disbanded in March 2003. Everyone was laid off (including me), Development was moved to Bangalore, but that effort was axed after 10 months or so without any results. No wonder, our codebase was exceedingly convoluted.
A shame really. The FH development process was a fine example of how things were supposed to be done. Proper bug tracking, competent managers (no, I was just a grunt developer), plenty of testers, proper specs. One can argue with the actual features and the archaic nature of the multitude of settings but the process was good. The latest release has unfortunately not held up well on OS X though.