Sad for Fireworks that was a very good tool for WebDesign. I might be switching to Corel Draw as I dont want to have anything to do anymore with Adobe.
The Future of Adobe Fireworks
31–40 of 81 posts
Re: The Future of Adobe Fireworks
#32> Over the last couple of years, there has been an increasing amount of overlap in the functionality between Fireworks and both existing and new programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Edge Reflow. Because we'd all much rather have to work in and pay for all three of those applications than to have the one tool that does it right?
The monthly creative suite subscription is a pretty good deal and lets you download/use all the cs apps.
It's certainly a very good deal for Adobe.
As a customer I don't feel it's a good deal for me at all as it forces me to pay for upgrades and products many of which I don't want, and divorces the money I pay from any specific product, so that I can no longer choose to reward products which address my needs, and ignore those which don't. I have no particular attachment to Fireworks for example, but Adobe streamlining their product offering and making it into a subscription suite only subsidises things like Adobe Bridge which simply shouldn't exist, at the expense of apps and features which customers actually want. It's around $80 a month in the UK for Adobe CC, and of course they will increase this gradually over time as more customers are locked in.
Given the CS updates of the last few years, I have trouble finding reasons to upgrade from CS5, which works fine for me currently, and have no interest in paying them money every month to change the UI around arbitrarily and add more misfeatures like 'Save for Microsoft Office' in CS Illustrator, or reinforce the lack of working interchange between InDesign CS versions (in order to force upgrades). As a long-term customer it feels like Adobe updates are now more focussed on forcing participation in the upgrade treadmill than adding features or improving performance, and this move to subscription pricing with a 'creative cloud' just reinforces this trend - Adobe is now all about customer lock-in and forcing customers to pay in-perpetuity, rather than producing great products. The last great product they produced was Lightroom, and I've seen nothing impressive in the CS since that (for my use). One telling result of this move is that they have now withdrawn the 'perpetual license' that they started selling last year - that lasted 1 year it seems.
Perhaps this is inevitable in the mature stage of a corporation, but I'm sad to see what was once a scrappy underdog fighting the likes of quark become focussed on keeping wall street rather than their customers happy.
Re: The Future of Adobe Fireworks
#33It's a great time to try Sketch: http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch/ . Does most of what Fireworks does much better. Unfortunately it's Mac only though.
I've been a fan of Fw for many years and now primarily use Sketch. It doesn't have the raster capabilities of Fireworks (Pixelmator's there when I need to work w/ bitmaps), but it has the same concept of Stylized Shapes and Shape Groups instead of Layers.
Lately I've also enjoyed its "Copy CSS Attributes" feature for building linear gradients or shadows visually, then getting code which I can quickly use in browser.
Re: The Future of Adobe Fireworks
#34It's a great time to try Sketch: http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch/ . Does most of what Fireworks does much better. Unfortunately it's Mac only though.
It would be great to see Sketch available for the PC. In the meantime, for of those on Windows, I would recommend trying Xara Photo and Graphic Designer.
http://www.xara.com/uk/products/designer/
They have a free trial, but they are actually giving away an older version of the software for free until 20th May 2013 (in the hope that users will upgrade, no doubt)
http://www.xara.com/us/specialoffers/designer/
Xara is more of an alternative to Illustrator but it includes some basic bitmap manipulation tools.
I have used Xara for many years and, in my opinion, it has a much better interface than Illustrator and is much more responsive in terms of screen redraw and speed. It's not completely equivalent to Illustrator in terms of features, but I would recommend downloading the trial (or the free version) and trying it out to see if it's suitable.
Re: The Future of Adobe Fireworks
#35I wonder what the thought process was behind allowing comments on a blog posting like this.
Re: The Future of Adobe Fireworks
#36My first copy of Fireworks I bought when it was still owned by Macromedia and it was wonderful; so powerful yet easy to use. It was my impression that Adobe never really "got" it, or knew how it should exist in their ecosystem as a sort-of competitor to their other products. It was sad watching it flounder, but I wonder what Adobe could've done differently.
Macromedia Fireworks MX 2004? Loved it, was my go-to image editor for a VERY long time.
Same here. I particularly liked its ability to do frame by frame animated gif editing easily. RIP.
Re: The Future of Adobe Fireworks
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Avid PaintCode user here, just learned about WebCode. Interestingly, more than once I wished I had the ability to export from PaintCode to something web with CSS or Canvas. Great to know there's now an app for that, but wouldn't it make sense to kinda also have it as additional functionality (maybe in-app purchase) for Paintcode?
Technically, this is entirely possible. We have developer builds which support both kinds of code generators in a single app. We're still considering this.
From my own personal perspective it might be a good idea, because I think it really messes with your branding -- I saw the WebCode page and knew it felt familiar and thought it was "that cool app that outputs Obj-C code" but looked in the feature list and couldn't find it, got very confused, and then did a google search...
It doesn't help that, as far as I can see, PixelCut doesn't have its own homepage, and there's no link from the one app page to the other app page so I didn't even know they were made by the same developer without looking at the copyright notice at the bottom!
Just my opinion anyway. Great app either way :)
Re: The Future of Adobe Fireworks
#38I was suspicious that something was up with Fireworks after purchasing the web bundle for CS6 and noticing that Fireworks didn't adopt the new dark minimalist design that Photoshop and Illustrator had.
I use Fireworks for all of my preliminary UI design work because it has the precision necessary to get across certain crucial design elements. Unfortunately, this is not possible with the low-fidelity wireframe alternatives and not intuitive in Adobe's other products.
Yes, many of Adobe's products have overlap, but prototyping is a key part of the design workflow and deserving of a dedicated platform.
Re: The Future of Adobe Fireworks
#39Sadly... now that I was considering buy a licence...
Re: The Future of Adobe Fireworks
#40My first copy of Fireworks I bought when it was still owned by Macromedia and it was wonderful; so powerful yet easy to use. It was my impression that Adobe never really "got" it, or knew how it should exist in their ecosystem as a sort-of competitor to their other products. It was sad watching it flounder, but I wonder what Adobe could've done differently.
I feel like Adobe never really got macromedia tools at all. They knew they wanted to own the content creation market, but they never really understood the developer side of the content creation game. Fireworks is the last Adobe tool I use these days and I'm disappointed they can never understand why someone like me would continue to use it.