Fireworks CS3: Thank You Adobe
Reviewed by Tim Verpoorten (Surfbits)
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http://www.adobe.com/products/fireworks/ As part of the CS3 Design Premium - $1,760 USD, Standalone - New - $299 USD and £300 GBP, Upgrade - $149 USD and £150 GBP.Requirements: PowerPC® G4 or G5 or multicore Intel processor; Mac OS X v.10.4.8; 256MB of RAM (512MB recommended) for PowerPC based system; 512MB (1GB recommended) for Intel based system; 1.6GB of available hard-disk space (additional free space required during installation); 1,024x768 monitor resolution with 16-bit video card; DVD-ROM drive; QuickTime 7 software required for multimedia features; Internet or phone connection required for product activation; Broadband Internet connection required for Adobe Stock Photos and other services. Original review at http://www.surfbits.com/?p=1149 In my review of Dreamweaver CS3, I mentioned that I’ve been using DW since version 1.0 and love it. The same can be said for Fireworks. I’ve been using it since the early stages and it works perfect for what I needed it to be, a fast, full-featured website design and website graphic application. Fireworks is a bitmap and vector graphics editor, it is designed specifically for web-based graphics. |
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Many users were worried that when Adobe purchased Macromedia that Fireworks would go the way of Freehand and be left to die a slow, non-upgradable death. But the powers that be in Adobe realized the potential of Fireworks and decided to keep it and drop Image Ready in the Photoshop family instead. All I can say is “Thank you Adobe”.
Fireworks could be a bit quarky in the manner that it approached design problems. The way it handled slicing and layers and animation were unique, but once you learned how Fireworks handled a situation, it was simple from that time forward. As I mentioned, I used Fireworks all the time for my graphic work. I resized images and designed new images and created animated images in Fireworks. To say that I was looking forward to seeing what Adobe did to Fireworks inCS3 was an understatement.
The first thing you noticed was that like Dreamweaver, the interface remained basically the same. Adobe allowed Fireworks to draw from their Bridge application for fast and easy image selection. Adobe also made certain that Fireworks played nicely with the big boys. You can now import PhotoShop and Illustrator formatted images into Fireworks and almost always keep the layers intact. In fact, Adobe even made it easier to import Fireworks images into Dreamweaver. Now a simple copy and paste is all it takes to move your finished graphic into your Dreamweaver website.
The next thing that Adobe added was something called Pages. It makes Fireworks your first stop for website design. You can now quickly mock-up a webpage in Fireworks and then save it as a page in a series of designs. In addition to designating a master page containing elements that you want to appear on every page, you can use Pages to quickly preview your whole website including hyperlinks and rollovers and hotspots all in one Fireworks file. What a wonderful and simple idea to streamline your whole website creation process.
One of the other added features worth checking out is the SlideShow command. You can take a folder full of graphics and either through Flash or Adobe’s Spry framework, create a slideshow that best resembles a photo gallery of graphics. I also noticed a Common Library feature that allowed you to store graphics and reusable pieces of graphics in a bin for use on other projects. This seemed very similar to what Flash does with it’s shared items. There’s also a new Color palette and a Path Tool for advanced vector work.
Fireworks CS3 is still my favorite graphics application. Adobe took a good product and have made several improvements. The improvements are not huge, but they are solid and it shows that Adobe has plans for Fireworks and I look forward to future versions. This is a definite upgrade for me. The upgrade price is $149 USD and new purchases are $299 USD. (MSRP)
