I knew this day was coming and yet I am still shocked. Fireworks is and always will be the best tool for wire-framing and web design, hands down. They've decided not to continue development of Fireworks and yet keep Dreamweaver? Dreamweaver is what I used for a period in my life when I was learning web development and you soon discover once you learn enough that it's horrible. I knew when Fireworks CS6 came out and Fireworks was neglected in the features and bug fixes department that it was only a matter of time.
Adobe is somewhat dead to me now. I'll continue to use Fireworks until it stops working completely and once it does might consider running a VM with a version of Windows that supports it. It's time for the open source community to step up to the plate and create an open sourced version of Fireworks, heck it would be amazing if Adobe open sourced Fireworks so us die-hard users who see its potential and power continue to make it better and keep it alive for many more years to come.
This wouldn't be such a bad thing if Adobe had another product like Fireworks, but they don't. Illustrator sucks for web design, Photoshop is too slow and bulky for agile web design or prototyping and the range of new applications Adobe has been bringing out don't really impress me in the slightest. The only way I can see Adobe from recovering from this is implementing some kind of way to load Photoshop in a "web mode" that gave you a similar interface as Fireworks but even then what about the features that make Fireworks so great? Pages, Master Pages, Styles, ability to click and drag elements around the canvas, Search and replace colours and fonts...
This is a very bad move. Those who say it's not a big deal have obviously never used Fireworks nor used it long enough to truly appreciate just how great of a tool it is. This one particular line in the post really grinds my gears, “We understand that Fireworks has one of the most passionate communities on the web” — obviously they don't understand at all, if they understood they'd see there is a following for Fireworks. Judging by the comments on the post (and they keep on coming) everyone agrees this is a bad move, I didn't see one comment that agreed this was the right thing to do. This is an attempt to move users onto newer web tools which in my opinion don't come anywhere close to the simplicity and power of Fireworks and most likely never will.
Fireworks was Adobe's only decent UX design tool and now I hope someone else see's any opportunity here to woo a very large number of Fireworks users who will be more than willing to pay for a decent and viable alternative to a very loved tool with a cult-like following.
It seems like Sketch from Bohemian Coding is the only decent Fireworks alternative that's out there and it's Mac only. You could use Gimp but we all know Gimp is far from a professional alternative to anything. This is a sad day for me and a lot of other people.
