If you ask me what my all time greatest piece of software is I will always reply “Photoshop”. It’s the tool that got me into this thing in the first place plus it’s one of the most intuitive programs I’ve ever had the pleasure to use.
But Lately I’ve been turning to Macromedia’s Fireworks for some specific tasks were I would normally have used Adobe’s legendary image software. Here’s a few reasons why:
Multiple Page Layouts
Many people by default use the frames feature purely for it’s intended purpose of creating animations. I use it increasingly for trying out different design layouts. The beauty is that the frames can then be exported as individual jpegs with just one export command.
Export to SWF
Because of Fireworks’ combination of pixels and vectors you can export you vector based design out to SWF and import it straight into Flash. Why would you want to do this? Well recently I was trying a page design which we then wanted to add in a Flash navigation element using the existing design. No need to redraw any of the elements in Flash I just exported the bits I needed straight from Fireworks as a SWF and then created the nav as usual in Flash. All the bits come in as vectors, exactly as they were in Fireworks.
Freehand Intergration
Sometimes you need to do more sophisticated vector manipulation than Fireworks will allow (3D skew for example) or maybe have more control over the typography. You can copy and paste between these 2 apps without any loss or change in the graphics, not even any need to export as an eps for example.
Photoshop will always be the king of image editors, particularly with it’s far superior use of mask (Fireworks is complete bobbins on that score), but Fireworks does have some cool features that make a worthwhile addition to your graphic toolkit. And no this has not been paid for by Macromedia!
Converted to fireworks a while back as the company i worked for won’t buy me photoshop.
It’s a good package, although i was disappointed with the new features in MX 2004, it seemd quite simular but for a lot more, i found it quite hard to justify the upgraded to my boss.
Tim / 29/09/2003