Copy & Paste Between Adobe & Macromedia Apps
Okay, Fireworks - great for vector-based web graphics, layouts and general web design. Photoshop, great for photo retouching and creating lush raster imagery. Illustrator, great for print and complex vector-based art. Flash, great for interactivity and incredibly smooth, code-based and timeline-based animation. Sometimes you’re lucky enough to work on a project where you can use all four of these applications. It’s definately fun to flex your design muscles, but it can often be a pain to get your apps to play nice with one another.
I often reuse a lot of assets between these applications, and find it very frustrating that in 2006 a simple copy and paste doesn’t work well between apps. I still can’t copy a graphic with transparency in Photoshop and paste it into Fireworks. I usually need to save it out as a flat PNG, expecially if I have complex layer effects.
Copying and pasting between Flash and Fireworks works quite well, as well as importing Fireworks documents into Flash (because they were both from Macromedia). Too bad we can’t go the other way - you usually need to go through a legacy AI format and that will almost always screw up your color palette. Or, you can export a flat PNG from Flash, but then you lose the advantage of vectors.
The same goes for the latest Adobe products, Photoshop and Illustrator. You can fairly easily go back and forth between the two apps seamlessly. Although, I must admit that the way Photoshop handles vectors - with the shape layer and masking combo - has always perplexed me and hurt my brain.
For a while, I could paste Illustrator Artwork into Fireworks, and Fireworks would read the vectors. I think the magic combination was Adobe Illustrator 8 and Fireworks MX. Perhaps it had to do with version offsets - Macromedia would make it work, and then the next release of Illustrator would use a different clipboard format and it would break (on purpose? I don’t know.)
So what’s the point of this post. None really. This is a blog on the internet. I would hope, though, that now the competion for our desktop - and clipboard - is over, all of next versions of Adobe’s apps will handle cross application copy and paste a lot better.
