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The Future of Adobe Fireworks

blogs.adobe.com

61–70 of 81 posts

Re: The Future of Adobe Fireworks

#61
post #58
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote here: I'm a CF dev ( shudder , I know) and everyone on my team hates Dreamweaver. In fact, Adobe has an IDE called ColdFusion Builder (we don't use it though), so I have no idea who still uses Dreamweaver: http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion-builder.html

I did CF over a decade ago, I remember this: http://nowostey.net/uploads/posts/2010-01/1264151016_84f0bc9... was one of the first things that I really liked that was killed by the Allaire -> Macromedia -> Adobe mergers. I'm not sure if I can blame adobe for that as Macromedia just left it to die.

I used to love CF Studio (the CF version of Homesite) and only gave it up 12 months ago. I was using a version that hadn't been updated for perhaps a decade or more. Couldn't get used to anything else I tried.

(Now using Sublime Text with the colour scheme tweaked to mimic CF Studio...)

Re: The Future of Adobe Fireworks

#62
post #4

My 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.

Macromedia never really got (some of) Macromedia tools either. I used to work on Fireworks. I don't mean I was using it; I was building it. It was always a red-headed stepchild, though. It went through as many near-death experiences as Apple, though the outside world never heard about it. It was the only product being built in Texas, a result of MM's strategy of growing by acquisition and spinning off products to avoid antitrust problems, and one day Macromedia closed down the whole office to cut costs and laid off everyone who wouldn't move to Silicon Valley. A few (very few) came up, but since they were now here in Tech Mecca, most no longer wanted to be on the career-limiting Fireworks team anymore. People on other teams doing cosmetic cross-product UI synchronization gave Fireworks the same cosmetic makeover to make it appear to still be alive, so upgrades were sold, and eventually it gathered a few new devs and muddled through.

It always had a passionate user base, which was always very small. It, like a font editor, a sound editor, and several other products that were canceled just didn't belong in a big company, but it always just barely survived the "product layoffs"--but just barely. My guess is that the CTO, Kevin Lynch (now at Apple) was personally fond of it and wouldn't let it die but couldn't afford to feed it or pay any attention to it, either. It should have been given to a small, lifestyle software company that would have loved it, cared for it, and lived well off its meager sales.

The big problem was that the Web devs who paid for software always had Photoshop, and most assumed that anything that Fireworks could do, Photoshop could, too, so why buy and learn another photo editor? Before they acquired Macromedia, Adobe always used to spread this FUD, and after the acquisition, they couldn't afford to say anything different about such a small product.

Oh, well. This is now an opportunity for someone much smaller than Adobe to create Fireworks II for that small, passionate market.

Re: The Future of Adobe Fireworks

#63

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 F…

[deleted]

Re: The Future of Adobe Fireworks

#64

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 F…

I'd respectfully disagree. Illustrator is far more common as a wireframe app than fireworks from all the UX people I've worked with.

Also, as a designer, CS6's pixel snapping and improved artboard handling and better smart object integration means web design has never been better.

IMHO, fireworks was fantastic 8 years ago, and has stagnated. Every serious pro designer I've worked with in top end design studios are psd/ai only.

Re: The Future of Adobe Fireworks

#65

I wonder what the thought process was behind allowing comments on a blog posting like this.

That's an interesting question. While we're kind of taking the conversation off topic, let me speculate. Imagine, if you will, that you have a popular product that you wish to EOL. And you know that people will not be happy. In fact, there'll be people who are downright angry and feel somehow betrayed. But you're going to do it. These people want to vent their frustration. These days, they can take to Twitter, blogs…

If it wasn't intentional by them, you've certainly explained the benefit of it.

Re: The Future of Adobe Fireworks

#68
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a student, I still feel like their subscription model needs work. $20 a month is too much for a single application, especially when it requires a year-long commitment. $30 for the academic subscription is a good deal because it includes everything, but I only use a few of the programs. Again, this option requires a year-long commitment. For an educational license, I'd gladly pay $10 for Photoshop. For a commercial…

Fair enough, but at the very least, $20 (or even $60) a month sure beats the hell out of paying $2000 in one go, in my opinion. Or to put it the way Adobe should've thought of it: Assuming $50 a month (I pay more atm) over the 10 years since I quit school, Adobe could've made 6000 dollars on me. Instead, they made 0. (up until they launched creative cloud, that is)

It does, but before the subscription program, I wouldn't be surprised if 98% of users had pirated copies.

The subscription fees are much more reasonable, but I'd be astonished if the rate of piracy has changed more than a few percentage points.

I wonder if lowering the price to something around $9.99 or $14.99 and dropping the annual contract would grow the user base enough to increase overall revenue.

Re: The Future of Adobe Fireworks

#70

So, who's going to start the petition to make this open source?

There is a petition ( http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/adobe-com-release-adob... ) and I posted it here on HN earlier, with some discussion going on there as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5666530

One thing that came up in the discussion was that Adobe wouldn't open source due to proprietary internal content.

However I replied this may or may not be true - Adobe has open-sourced several large projects. Flex (http://www.adobe.com/products/flex.html), for example is a big software product that Adobe switched to open source in 2007.

From an article back then:

"Ward outlined the transition as having the following steps:

    Today - Creation of Mailing List for Discussion
    Summer 2007 - Public Bug Database and Daily Builds
    Second Half 2007 - Flex 3 Released
    December 2007 - Read Only SVN Access, Patches Welcome
    2008 - Committers with Write Access, Creation of Possible Subprojects "
see: http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/04/flex-open-source

and: http://readwrite.com/2007/04/26/adobe_takes_fle

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