I want to thank everyone for your comments on my previous post regarding Fireworks. I have been sharing all of your feedback to our teams.
I’m thrilled to be working with such a passionate group of users. Keep the comments coming!
Fireworks Workflow — Thank You!
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
After upgrading to CS4, we tried out Fireworks for some of our web projects, and here are our impressions.
The current CS4 build is too buggy (especially with text) and its very difficult to work-around its Version Cue CS4 crashes/overwrites (probably a problem more with VC CS4 than Fireworks).
Aside from the bugs, it seems too “Macromedia”ish in its cheap user interface and Adobe would make a lot of people happy if they either provided a “Photoshop user interface” version or integrated its functionality in to PS. The main advantages it seems to have over PS is: (a) fast alignment of objects as they’re drawn; (b) organization of pages/states to suit a site layout; (c) quick handling of slices for choosing the compressions and for exporting.
I cannot say that the prototyping is very useful since we don’t generally spend the up-front time to create a working site for each of the possible designs to our clients. We provide a few layouts and designs to choose from and discuss these at the first round—people generally know what a rollover and drop-down menu are from using other web sites. If we did do this, Fireworks supports only the basic rollovers and remote rollovers in the behaviors panel, not the nested drop down menus and such.
Given all of this, in its current state, we’d likely stick to exporting our PS designs to FW at the very end for slicing and production.
Of course, my premises may be wrong due to my ignorance of certain FW features. Thanks for reading.
Totally disagree here. Fireworks’s “cheap” user interface is the PRIMARY reason I chose it over Photoshop. I’m actually kind of shocked to hear you make that statement which is literally the exact opposite of my impression. Before Adobe bought Macromedia I would constantly find myself explaining why I preferred Fireworks over Photoshop, and the first thing I always mentioned was “its superior interface”. I’d love to hear what exactly you don’t like or think is missing from the interface, or that PS does better.
Note: I don’t notice this as much because all of my workstations are quad cores w/ 8GB of ram and high end graphics, but the property inspector DOES seem to take way too long to update when you select a text object. Sometimes I’ll be waiting 1 second or more for the update, even on these pretty high-powered systems. I’d love to see that improved.
To me, Fireworks interface always looked superior!
(Same as to David McGuigan).
It’s more intuitive than the interface of Photoshop, it’s easier to understand, and (before Fw CS4 was released) it was also faster. (Btw, I’d like to see the Property Inspector panel update times again as fast as in Fw CS3 and below, there is a problem, for sure).
To me, one of the worst nightmares would be to one day to see Fireworks ‘re-vamped’ with the interface of Photoshop! Don’t do this, please!!
The Fireworks intuitive interface is why I prefer it to Photoshop. And for a variety of other reasons, too (I have expressed most of them in a comment in the previous post on the same topic).
Fireworks is easy to use, easy to understand for both novices and pros, and has a mix of features, which no other Adobe app has! Keep it improving, don’t make it photoshop-ish in look & feel!