Fireworks: The death of an old friend
Here's something I’ll admit to very few people: I rarely use Photoshop anymore. No, really, it’s true—I’m a professional designer and I hardly use it at all.
Back in 1997, I was invited to Macromedia’s headquarters over on Townsend got to participate in a beta for a new program they were launching called “Fireworks”. The premise was pretty amazing: they were building an image editing program based on the failed Xres that had editable type and vector graphics, specifically for web design.
Fireworks 1.0 (I think)
I still remember, watching the demo thinking: “Oh my god! It has editable text and drop shadows!” I was stunned—just completely blown away.
Now, by todays standards, this is hardly a big deal. But in 1997, (begin old, codgerly voice) we had Photoshop 4, and there was no editable text. Creating a drop shadow meant duplicating the layer, filling it with black, running the gaussian blur filter on it, and offsetting it by hand. Need to fix a typo? You're re-generating the whole text layer… and the drop shadow.
Fireworks made so many of these little things so much faster and easier for building comps. And, at the same time, it's image compression rivaled that of the omnipresent Debabblizer. This meant you could layout your art, quickly edit text and filters during iteration, and then slice it and compress the final assets, all in the same application. It was an amazing time saver.
Starting with one of the early beta versions, I started using Fireworks, and never looked back. It’s been one of the main tools in my chest for over a decade now, and I've turned many other designers on to it's magnificence. Adobe has since bought Macromedia, and last year’s version of Adobe Fireworks CS3 was just OK. Many of the new “features” were crap, (no, please don't generate Javascript or CSS for me, thanks), but I guess it was nice to have an intel-native application for my macbook (it sure didn't seem any faster).
I finally upgraded to Fireworks CS4 this weekend. Once again, there was no good reason to do so feature-wise (no, please don't generate “better” CSS for me, thanks) but I thought I'd give the heavily criticized new Adobe UI a go.
What in the fuck happened here?
This has got to be one of the buggiest applications I've ever—in my entire history of computing—used. How did Adobe, who's QA is usually pretty solid, let this ship? In the 2 days I've been using it, CS4 has crashed dozens of times.
One of the more common crashers I've found is: draw a box, changed the fill to a gradient, and boom, there she goes. A box with a gradient. Seriously.
There are a number of bugs in the “symbols” implementation—something I rely on heavily—where breaking symbols no longer works, resizing symbols can corrupt and lose data in the symbol, and occasionally, things inside symbols move around all on their own. This is bad.
There are bugs with elements forgetting their filter effects: i.e. put a drop shadow on an object, move to a different frame and back, said shadow's properties changed.
And then there's the new type engine.
Can I have my money back, adobe?
They’ve apparently replaced the old Macromedia based engine with Adobe code. Unfortunately it’s completely broken. Fonts change their rending on redraw. Type boxes move around without doing anything. And, like you can see above, type displays outside of the type box. This is one of those things that I saw within 10 minutes of using CS4, and judging by the bugs filed with Adobe, I'm not alone.
After a couple of days, I've gone back to Fireworks 8 (which is after MX 2004, and before CS3, if you're keeping track—gotta love those naming conventions), as it seems to be the fastest and most stable version to me.
There’s an open letter from another Fireworks user to Adobe bemoaning the death of one of our most valuable tools, but frankly, I think this is it for Fireworks. Adobe has made a statement here: they're clearly not willing to invest the time or expense into developing or maintaining it any longer.
Like a carpenter with a favorite hammer, I feel an almost emotional bond with Fireworks. I'll likely hang on to version 8 for as long as it will run on my computer… and when it finally does die, it will be heartbreaking.
barclay loftus