Wooooah... I know some folks will ask "where have you been for the last 4 years?" but Fireworks rocks for UI sketching! It's been a while since any public software has made me smile and want to use it more. The only other recent gems were SketchUp, Firefox, Streets & Trips, OneNote, and ZBrush 2.0.
This weekend, I slept 7 hours and spent the rest of the time working in Fireworks to sketch UI concepts. The selection and text tools put Flash's selection tools to shame, and the grouping/layers/effects feature combinations are door-knob simple in the best sense possible. I can't think of a reason to use Photoshop again. Out of habit, I noticed lots of opportunities for improvements, particulary with layers, distributed frames, group editing, symbol editing, gradients, swatch management, and memory leaks/instability. If I'm forced to restart an application process in the task manager at regular intervals after 4am and still feel happy about the product, I'd interpret that tolerance as a strong indicator of the product's value :) On the whole, I wish I could send massive kudos to the product designers who evolved this app. They definitely show they care about users.
Posted by samuel at September 27, 2004 02:37 PMi just wish macromedia would make the drawing tools in flash more like fireworks.
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i agree, i barely touch photoshop for my web projects. fireworks is still missing a path to marquee tool (at least one that is on the right-click context-menu), but i have only had to use photoshop for opening PSDs that had to be retuned as PSDs (since fireworks can do psd to png rather well).
i still keep installed for the gamma correction utility it installs withit, at least until i:
a) move to a Mac
b) find a replacement tool for windows
I had my doubts that Fireworks could supplant Photoshop, but after a quick demo from Sam there's no mistaking the dominating UI prototyping skills.
Forget all the old raster-bound tricks you learned in Photoshop. No more selection tool + masking tricks for building rounded rectangles. No more grouped layer hacks.
Posted by: Devon at October 1, 2004 10:47 PMFireworks leaves photoshop dead for web design. Photoshop is the best for what it does, photo editing (hence the name).
In saying that, Fireworks needs a couple of things still, like flow around text PLEASE, sick of breaking text boxes up to go around images etc! And when you ungroup a pasted inside object, the object pasted inside always goes behind the maks object, this is very annoying because I find that I normally want to edit that object, not the mask. maybe next version.
Posted by: Tim Madden at October 20, 2004 12:57 AMA question for you guys?!
One you do the lay out in fireworks and everything.
How do you go about converting it into HTML.
Do you guys slice it up and export it as HTML and tables in fireworks? (And what is the best set up for it? Thanks?!)
or do you cut out the images and type the HTML< CSS yourselfs and then insert the images?
Posted by: Henry at November 17, 2004 07:40 PM