Please Don’t Kill Fireworks!
I’m reading in a lot of places that, as a result of the Adobe/Macromedia merger, a few applications might be shelved permanently. There are rumors floating around that one of these apps might be Fireworks. I very much hope that is not the case. I use Fireworks almost exclusively for web design. Fireworks was built from the ground up as a web design tool. It is to web design what Autocad is to architects. It’s vector-based features and nesting symbols make it perfect for designing an entire site’s GUI.
When I first started in web design (I began my career in architecture), I was completely baffled how anyone could design anything in Photoshop. Photoshop is a photo-editing tool. That’s what it is good at.
This was back in the days of Photoshop 5.5… if I wanted to draw a nav bar, I had to make a rectangular selection on an empty layer, and use the bucket tool to fill it with the color of my choice. If I wanted to make that wider later, I would have to do a lot of redrawing.
Whereas in Fireworks, it’s just a matter of dragging across the corners and pulling some anchors. If I had elements that repeat in a lot of places, I could use symbols… and if they need to change, all I need to do is change it in once place.
To me, Photoshop is still a photo-editing tool. Sure, they’ve grafted on a lot of extras to try to appeal to the web designer, but they are poorly integrated, and feel clunky. Also, Fireworks doesn’t take 5 years to load like Photoshop CS.
It would be horribly irresponsible for Adobe to drop Fireworks. And for Photoshop to subsume the features of Fireworks would make i even more bloated and unusable. Leave my Fireworks alone.
