Cool Illustrator Plug-in: Xtream Path

Xtream Path, by CValley Software, is a set of tools that allow you to work with paths a little easier than just the Direct Selection tool. There are demo videos on their site and I can think of a bunch of uses for these tools.

Multiple Artboards

Illustrator CS4 now supports multiple artboards. I know, I know, Freehand had this capability for a long time, but now Illustrator finally can do it. But differently. It's not like multiple pages in Freehand or InDesign, it's very flexible. There's an artboard tool that allows you to modify or select each artboard. When you start a new document, you can choose how many artboards you want.

I think this is awesome, especially for someone who works in Illustrator for print design work. You can create collateral pieces now in a single Illustrator document, which saves a lot of headache's finding files, etc.

+ Freehand RIP +

Not surprisingly, especially with the release of CS3, Freehand will go the way of PageMaker and many other products, as Adobe will no longer develop it. I've used Freehand, I've taught others how to use it and, honestly, I've never liked it.

It could be one of those things where I used Illustrator first and not Freehand and if it were the other way around, maybe I would've liked it. What I didn't like about it was that it just felt clunky. There were hundreds of palette's and features, but you had to seriously dig to find them.

I'm not going to miss it, will you?

Illustrator CS3

Mordy Golding has a nice video podcast about the new features in Illustrator CS3. I'm really rev'd up about it now and can't wait to get my hands on it. There are some great features that are built-in to Illustrator that help people like me work with Flash. You can create symbols directly in Illustrator now, either graphic or movie clip. You can even create Flash text! Pretty amazing stuff.

Check it out.