Because of the changing marketplace and evolving technologies I am aggressively moving toward web design to make a living. I’ve gone through every Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Flash tutorial I can get my hands on.

I love Fireworks. One thing I wish it would do:

Give us the ability to import raster images the way Indesign does, as a link, rather than embedded. That way we can resize, etc. in a non-destructive fashion. Recently a client had me enlarge most of the photos on his website. I had to replace them because they no longer had the resolution they needed in order to be enlarged. A simple link would have solved that. Another benefit would be an easier way to crop the images (rather than pasting on a mask, which seems counterintuitive to me–I either want to import the image through a frame or else paste it INTO a shape).

I’d also like to have the ability to use the same keyboard commands in Fireworks (and Flash) that I use in Illustrator and Indesign.

Immense! Fireworks is my graphic design tool of preference. I don’t understand why some prefer Photoshop for graphic design for Web. Fireworks is faster, it’s easier to mock up projects for websites in it, it’s easier to produce the final design, it is an excellent tool for all kind of designs for screen, it opens almost perfectly PSD files, it has the perfect blend of vector+bitmap tools (something that Ps or Ai will maybe never achieve), live effects, pages, layers, intuitive interface (Ps’s interface is still very bad, IMHO, in terms of usability), in a word: this is a program that I cannot live without!

I use it for graphic design for Web, for logo design, for quickly editing photographs, for almost all of my design work…

Only for print design would I use Ps or Ai. All other tasks are for Fireworks. Since I started to use Fireworks (Fireworks MX), I never looked back. And I never quite learned Ps – I didn’t need to! ))

> Where do you find the value of Fireworks and it’s integration with Creative Suite and other Adobe design and development tools?

In a perfect world, Fireworks would integrate 100% with Flash, Ai and Ps. Thus, a file created in one of these three programs could be imported into Fw and then back, without losing vectors or effects or anything…

In a more perfect world, Fireworks PNG format could be opened by Ps and Ai, without any losses, too

IMO – Fireworks is the ultimate web design tool.

Graphics creation -> exporting optimized graphics with slices, and then hand-coding HTML and CSS to make those images live.

-matt heerema
principal designer
Weblogs, Inc. (AOL / Mediaglow)
engadget.com, autoblog.com, joystiq.com, tuaw.com, downloadsquad.com, etc….

both usecases have suffered a lot from new bugs introduced with fwcs4. the textbox jumping bug is the most annoying one, effectivly reducing my productivity for at least 15% of time and 100% of mood.

the new font engine keeps my now from making fine text layout for logodesigns in fw, as kerning doesnt work as it used and should do. you just cant figure out a proper distance between two letters, if the only way you can manipulate the distance is while one of them is inverted by selction.
therefore, just two weeks after purchasing my copy, i am thinking strongly about switching back to fwcs3 despite losing the mentionable improvements to pages/frames, fontselection and styles features in cs4.

Like my colleague Natasha (above), I don’t get it.

I’m a Flex and Flash developer. Mocking up Flex apps in Fireworks is also a mystery to me. Why not just mock them up in Flex? Or Flash? I really just don’t get it at all.

As each new version comes along, I dutifully read the feature list yet nothing about it ever seems to offer me anything I need over and above what photoshop already offers. Fireworks always has been, and remains a mystery to me.

As far as I’m concerned, if it does something that photoshop doesn’t do, the just stick it in photoshop. What’s the point of having multiple graphix programs? This is one area where Adobe’s strategy seems to be all of a muddle.