I've been using Fireworks since the first version and always preferred
it over Photoshop for several reasons:
1) Most UI work involves moving around objects, whether they are
buttons, fields, labels, blocks of text or other graphic elements.
Fireworks is essentially a vector environment with some bitmap tools,
which is pretty much the reverse of Photoshop. This means that if you
are working with a design, doing iterations, and someone suggests a
button be moved or a field expanded, in Photoshop it often meant some
bitmap editing, unless you want hog-wild with a layer for every single
solitary element.
2) Fireworks integrates web tools, such as slicing and image-map tools
into the drawing environment. For instance, you can select a button,
and then choose 'Create Hot Spot', and it will size it perfectly to
size. This is really handy for creating complex, dense image maps for
prototyping. While things have gotten better in Photoshop, in earlier
versions, you would frequently find yourself re-doing source files, re-
exporting, and redoing image maps with a couple of tools rather than
just one.
3) Fireworks' native file format is PNG. That means that you can
circulate images to Business types who have no graphic software to
speak of, and they can still see your files. This has been a sometimes-
yes, sometimes-no situation with Photoshop over the years. PNG is a
nice file format to work with for a variety of reasons; it has built-
in lossless compression so files aren't huge when you are sending them
back and forth, it has transparency, and it supports as much colour as
you need (unlike GIF or JPEG which lose quality for either of those
reasons). Its a big win when you can say to a client that you are
always working with PNGs, so they can see things at every step of the
way, instead of flattened proxies.
4) There are several graphic effects, notably bevels and drop shadows,
that were helpful in UI design work (although they often have become a
bit overused, in my opinion), but the fact that they were, up until
recently, only non-destructive in Fireworks was a help. Again, these
also appear in Photoshop, but they are again, for each layer rather
than on an object by object basis. The ability to copy and paste
object styles while in the early design stages is a great way to see a
large set of elements in different colours and tones quickly.
5) Fireworks has more recently included a lot of the active guide
features that Omnigraffle had. These are a god-send for doing quick,
drag and drop UIs because alignment and centering is pretty much done
on-the fly.
6) For large, complex projects, Fireworks' Image and object style
libraries helped me make sure that colours, bevels, shadows, and other
elements were always consistent from drawing to drawing. The image
library can include an entire widget set, and their new 5-slice
resizing ensures that even if you make a button longer to accommodate
a longer string of text, the rounded corners don't become a different
scale or in the case of a bitmap, start to blur.
7) Fireworks provides a multi-page document format that lets you
generate clickable PDFs (or you can export a series of pages to a
series of JPEGs or GIFs, if necessary) so that you can delivery
prototypes easily. For web projects. I find that 90% of the
communication that I need to make about UI layouts and sequence can be
handled by these prototypes.
8) When working with Flash programmers, the ability to export my files
as swf files is nice too, as they can open them and animate them
without having to re-create anything.
I agree, however, that CS4 has made a mess of some things. When Adobe
took the tool from Macromedia, they completely ruined the text
handling (and there were horrendous bugs that had me literally
screaming when I opened files and found text moved around (and
sometimes unfixable). I also agree that the Adobe Palette UI is
idiosyncratic and the windowing and docking is really annoying. That
said, the alignment tools have been so helpful, that I can't see
myself going back, especially since they sent out a set of patches to
address the text mess.
I remember Deneba Canvas (as well as Superpaint - remember that?).
Don't know about Studio/8, but as far as I can tell, if Adobe keeps
Fireworks as more of a Web prototyping tool (and, I suppose, an Adobe
Air and Flex prototyping tool), I think it will do well.
--
David Drucker
ddruc...@mac.com
Vancouver, BC
On 3-Jun-09, at 10:55 AM, Andrei Herasimchuk wrote:
So I'm genuinely curious... why do some folks prefer Fireworks over
Photoshop? I ask this knowing most of the answers I think, but I
want to see or hear more opinions about aspects of certain features
to get a better understanding of what specifically makes Fireworks
compelling for some over Photoshop.
To reveal my bias early, I've always disliked Fireworks for two very
specific reasons: I hate the way it handled type, and there were
layer/grouping flaws it had that drove me bonkers. I'm not even
going to claim Photoshop or Illustrator's handling of type is
remotely correct for screen display design, but they both have print
legacies that always get in the way, but having used them for so
long, it was always the devil you know versus the devil you don't
for me personally in this regard. I also know Photoshop's handling
of object art is less than stellar, but Fireworks still had layer
and grouping flaws Fireworks for so long that drove me nuts, I
simply could never get past them for day to day grunt work.
It appears most of the things I disliked about Fireworks have been
finally fixed in CS4. Only problem now? Well... I've been largely
quiet with regard to CS4 but I'll say it openly now that I seriously
want to throttle the dev and design team over Adobe for completely
effing up the framework interface. And since they bought the farm on
making it across the board, Fireworks now shares the same buggy
redraw, crappy windowing and inelegant docking and palette layout
behaviors that are plaguing the entire creative suite now. So my
chance to finally give Fireworks a real run after they fixed my core
problems that were getting my way is going to have to wait until the
CS team gets on the ball and brings the quality back online to what
it used be for Adobe.
In the meantime though... I've been wanting to be convinced that
Fireworks wasn't just another Denaba Canvas or Studio/8 wannabe.
So... if you have a moment to share, I'd love to hear more on the
whole Photoshop+Illustrator versus Fireworks thing.
--
Andrei Herasimchuk
Chief Design Officer, Involution Studios
innovating the digital world
e. and...@involutionstudios.com
c. +1 408 306 6422
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