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Fireworks is NOT Photoshop!

By on November 6, 2006 in Design & Development

Yes, I know that I’m repeat­ing myself and I know that this is obvi­ous to most of you. But appar­ently it’s not obvi­ous to many and I think it’s worth repeating.

Recently I started to see a lot of the mis­con­cep­tions about Fireworks I have been talk­ing about here and which prompted me to write this arti­cle. Once again, Fireworks is NOT Photoshop (obvi­ous) but more than that, Fireworks is not the same kind of appli­ca­tion as Photoshop and this is not so obvi­ous apparently…

Like I said, I’ve started com­ing into con­tact with many peo­ple for whom Fireworks is new or who have been work­ing with it basi­cally the same way they would work in Photoshop (yes I’m talk­ing about this…). I think the sim­plest way this can be put is that Fireworks is just like Illustrator with some Photoshop-​like func­tion­al­ity. But at its core it’s a vec­tor based appli­ca­tion just like Illustrator or FreeHand but unlike those two apps it can edit raw image pix­els directly just like Photoshop. That makes Fireworks a hybrid vector/​raster appli­ca­tion with a pri­mar­ily vec­tor based work­flow. Layers in Fireworks for exam­ple work like Illustrator’s NOT Photoshop’s (Fireworks lay­ers con­tain “objects”, not just pix­els). I’ll stop here for now but if you want more detailed infor­ma­tion, read my arti­cle.

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Adobe, Macromedia & Fireworks

By on December 8, 2005 in Adobe, Fireworks

There has been a lot of dis­cus­sion in blogs and news­groups fol­low­ing the recent clos­ing of the trans­ac­tion for the acqui­si­tion of Macromedia by Adobe. I have been read­ing a lot about it in the last few days, offi­cial words and com­men­tary alike and there’s one thing that’s really been bug­ging me in many of the coments I’ve seen.

There’s a lot of peo­ple who seem to be con­fused about what Fireworkis is or what it can do. They spec­u­late that Fireworks is doomed because it’s not as “strong” as Photoshop or worse, because it “com­petes” with ImageReady. Both state­ments are dead wrong.

First of all, Fireworks is fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent in nature than both Photoshop and ImageReady as it is a true vec­tor based appli­ca­tion (not a raster appli­ca­tion with awk­ward vec­tor fea­tures tacked on like Photoshop…). Fireworks’ bitmap tools indeed do not have the depth of Photoshop’s but it doesn’t have the same pur­pose either. Fireworks was designed for the cre­ation of Web graph­ics only. It does not have Photoshop’s print her­itage. There is really no direct com­par­i­son between the two apps other than they their shar­ing some func­tion­al­ity and both are used to cre­ate Web sites graph­ics (although I really can’t think why any­one would sub­ject them­selves to the tedium of lay­ing out a Web site in Photoshop…).

Secondly, com­par­ing Fireworks with ImageReady makes even less sense despite what many peo­ple seem to think. ImageReady is really noth­ing more than a glo­ri­fied slic­ing, opti­miz­ing and export­ing tool and while those tasks are cer­tainly part of what Fireworks does they’re only a frac­tion of its func­tion­al­ity. Fireworks is first and fore­most a cre­ative tool whith which you design site lay­outs and graph­ics, not a mere “slic­ing and dic­ing” tool used after the “real” work gets done in a more sophis­ti­cated appli­ca­tion like Photoshop or Illustrator.

With Fireworks there is no mid­dle man, you cre­ate then slice then opti­mize and pre­view graph­ics right within the same inte­grated and effi­cient inter­face with pre­cise and flex­i­ble vec­tor as well great bitmap tools. Regardless of the innacu­rate infor­ma­tion some are spread­ing about Fireworks and beyond all the spec­u­la­tion sur­round­ing the acqui­si­tion and plans for spe­cific prod­ucts, I choose to hope that Adobe will be smart enough to rec­og­nize the unique nature of Fireworks and keep it around and develop it fur­ther. Fireworks really should have a future and deserves bet­ter recog­ni­tion than what it got under Macromedia’s inept mar­ket­ing efforts on its behalf…

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