On 3-Jun-09, at 12:02 PM, Andrei Herasimchuk wrote:
On Jun 3, 2009, at 11:34 AM, David Drucker wrote:
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.
Can you be more specific? Making a button longer or a field wider
requires editing no matter what, they are just different approaches
when you need to do the editing. Also, if you group things into
folders, you get an object-like behavior in Photoshop, with regard
to the major transformation tools.
In the case of some objects, like buttons, labels or tables, the text
was a separate object from the object that contained it (or it was
'bound' to). As they sometimes say 'You're doing it wrong', and
perhaps this was the case for me with PS, but in FW, I could simply
edit a button name or label and in the case of a library object, it
stayed with the button (like grouping, I know). For table text, this
was a little trickier (Damn, there really needs to be some sort of
'table object' that you can add text to and format, etc. , but now
I'm getting into the realm of feature-request).
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.
What about file size in transport? Is that not a concern?
During development phases of a project, I've found that the average
size of a file (in KB/MB/GB) for PSD was almost always 1MB or larger
(I know, it depends on what you are working on - I am generalizing a
bit here, so that's always dangerous). This meant that file
attachments to email, FTP transfers, etc. all took longer with PSD
files. Fireworks, due to the built-in compression of PNG, seemed to be
on average, smaller. Also, it's worth noting that on the Mac, you
could see the PNG attachments inside the email, and more recently,
I've viewed them on my iPhone, both of which are a nice plus. Don't
remember if the current version of Photoshop does this (I must confess
that I'm not using CS4 of Photoshop, so my comparison here is slightly
out of date).
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.
I'd have to see more specific examples to see what you mean in
context. In Photoshop, you have to build up the effects to create
certain visual treatments so you actually want them to be non-group
specific, at least in my experience. That's how you arrive at
subtlety and richness on the visual side.
There's a set of non-destructive visual effects that you can build-up
(like the PS adjustment layers, I suppose) that can be copied and
pasted from one object to one or more others all at once, including
text and size, border style, colour, shadow, bevel - it's a large set
of attributes. It's fast and easy, and when you have it the way you
want, you can save it as a style swatch. As for slight variations
among different objects, yes, I guess Photoshop would be better for
that, but I guess I'm not after UIs that are that 'photographic' in
approach. In a case where I needed for something to be like that, I'd
defer to a Graphic Designer, since then it feels as if it's out of the
realm of UI design and more about aesthetics. I get the feeling we are
talking at cross-purposes here, and I'd need to see examples of what
you mean, too...
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.
Those active guides in Fireworks have been in Illustrator since 1997
(or was it 98?). I remember working with Martin Newell on
implementing the feature back then. I'm of two different mindsets
with Smart Guides... I absolutely love them at certain critical
points, but sometimes I find they get in my way too much. I had
assumed the Fireworks team grabbed the Smart Guides code from the
Illustrator team or used the feature from Illustrator as the basis
for theirs, but I could easily be wrong there. Smart Guides have
gotten much better over the past 12 years, but still need some major
refinement on the behavior side.
I agree. Omnigraffle, for me, is the king of Smart Guides, and I've
often used it's behavior to show developers some great ways of
thinking about the relationships of objects and how the computer can
work with the human. Fireworks, for me, is missing a key Smart Guide
behavior, which is the 'Equivalent Distance' indicator, when an object
is moved within range of 2 others in a straight line, so you you can
then see where to drop it so all three will now be distributed with
equal space between them. I haven't used Illustrator enough to really
put it's Smart Guides through its paces, but it's nice to know that
this technology is now fairly ubiquitous.
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.
This is the biggest reason I know why people love Fireworks, and I
have to agree it's the kind of thing that can make the choice a deal
breaker for some. I've never been fond of libraries only because I
find them too tedious to maintain over the long-haul of a project or
too limiting in making everything I do look cookie-cutter. But for
large amounts of grunt work, they are certainly a massive
productivity boost.
I think you've hit it on the head here: Fireworks is strongest when
you need standardization of elements. It's not a tool for the art in
a UI, but more for the spinning out of similar screens (or portions of
them) once you've got the style of the thing down. It sounds as if you
are more interested in the artistic elements of the process (and I
admire that), but unfortunately, most of the work I've had is more
about the workaday simplicity and usability of a UI, not it's richness.
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.
This is the other big reason, as Nasir also stated. This was the
reason I tried many times in the past to use FW, but the type and
grouping issues always drove me away in the end.
Yeah, I guess it comes down to early formation of work habits. It's
that effect of getting comfortable with the first tool/OS/system that
you start with, like ducks to a 'mother duck' (heard something about
this being a real term somewhere).
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.
This is the crux of the problem, and the reason why I asked the
question. I don't think the tool makers need to keep creating a
"web" tool. What the world needs now is a real robust *SCREEN
DISPLAY* design tool, one aimed at all the things digital and pixels
to allow you to do all that you need visually for the display, mixed
with the statefulness and random access behaviors that code requires
to truly design a professional grade interface for any software
product, regardless of medium; web, RIA, desktop, mobile.
Ah, to dream.
--
Andrei Herasimchuk
Chief Design Officer, Involution Studios
innovating the digital world
e. and...@involutionstudios.com
c. +1 408 306 6422
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