The IxDA SF event was held at Adobe (an excellent meeting venue and
generous spread) and the evening concluded with a lengthy Catalyst
demo from a key guy on their team. I'm spacing his name but he's in
one of their online demo vids as well. Anyways, afterwards, I
corralled him and said what was up with their delayed Fireworks
integration. He said that the Fireworks workflow was not going to be
as integrated as Photoshop and Illustrator. (I didn't press for
specifics but maybe it's in that round-trip?) Naturally, I protested
loudly. To no avail. :)
My guess is that its origin as a Macromedia product has either spelled
its demise politically within Adobe (the lead Fireworks guy, Alan
Musselman, has left the company) or else technically in terms of its
code base being too different from Photoshop & Illustrator. An
*extremely* unfortunate state of affairs; IMO, there is no better
interaction design tool for documenting production-ready GUIs than
Fireworks (for static images)...or, well, at least that was true
before CS4.
Cheers,
Liz
On Jun 2, 2009, at 10:19 AM, Nasir Barday wrote:
I was as giddy as a schoolgirl for Catalyst. But as of this Beta, it
doesn't
open Fireworks CS4 files natively! Only Illustrator and Photoshop
files. I
would have thought that Fireworks, a tool positioned for prototyping
(and
even with some teasers of Flex integration, and mapped to Catalyst's
concept
of States!) would have a stronger relationship with a tool dedicated
to
taking prototypes to the next step. Actually, I always wondered why
Catalyst
wasn't conceived as a feature of Fireworks, since FW already supports
importing Illustrator and Photoshop files. But that's a discussion for
another day.
For now, Catalyst seems only to open Fireworks PNGs as flattened files
(you'll only see the first page of a Fireworks CS4 file). You can do a
one-way export into the new FXG format from Fireworks CS4, but it
doesn't
look like you can round-trip between Catalyst and Fireworks, which
was what
made these two products powerful, in my mind. You can import assets
from
Fireworks individually and edit them in place (well, if you go through
Illustrator...), but this wastes a lot of time if you've already
laid out a
full design in Fireworks and want to continue cranking out mockups
as the
product evolves. And as we all know, the design WILL change as soon
as you
play with it as an interactive prototype. I wonder why this
fundamental
insight wasn't baked in from the beginning.
To be clear, I want to be as constructive and snark-free as possible
with
this post-- Adobe sponsored the Interaction conference this year,
and they
even made a good-faith effort to set up a Catalyst demo there as a
free
workshop. It didn't work out in the end due to an illness, but many
of took
home pre-release versions of Catalyst! If any of you Adobe folks are
following this discussion, I would be curious to know if native
round-tripping with Fireworks is planned for Catalyst. Not sure why
you
wouldn't do this, as Fireworks's layout (and philosophy) has such a
natural
mapping to Catalyst's world.
- Nasir
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