It's official: No new versions of FreeHand.

I think that we've all known this deep inside for quite some time now, but finally, Adobe has made their decision known about the future of FreeHand.

Adobe does not plan to develop and deliver any new feature-based releases of FreeHand. Adobe will, however, continue to sell FreeHand MX, and will offer technical and customer support according to our support policies.

Adobe further states:

While we recognize that FreeHand has a dedicated user base, we encourage you to migrate to Adobe© Illustrator© CS3. As a loyal FreeHand customer, you’re entitled to special pricing for Illustrator CS3, along with free access to special resources to help you make this move.

Adobe's special upgrade pricing for FreeHand users is $199 US (and all English versions). It's 199 EU for the International English version, 249 EU for localized versions, and is 24,762 YEN in Japan.

To be even more clear, Adobe said it has no plans to provide maintenance releases, patches or updates for FreeHand MX, nor any plans to deliver native Intel-Mac or Vista versions either.

Adobe is offering assistance for users making the move from FreeHand to Illustrator by offering a variety of resources in the way of documents and videos, which are available at www.adobe.com/illustrator/switch.

My own opinion is that I'm glad Adobe has finally spoken about this. Adobe did a huge disservice in my opinion, by avoiding any word on this issue for so long, making it difficult for both individual users and large organizations to decide on how to proceed. Yes, the writing was always on the wall, but as most anyone will tell you -- not knowing is a lot worse than knowing.

That being said, I'm happy that Adobe took the first step by starting to add some FreeHand-like features to Illustrator in the recent release of CS3. I can only hope that they will continue to do that in future versions.

Full details from Adobe here.