Tami Weiss

Hello,

I am a web designer and sometimes developer in the Milwaukee area. I created beautiful, standards compliant webpages that are not only usable, but deliciously delightful. Check out my portfolio.

• Fireworks CS4: The Good, the Bad and the Buggy

  January 14th, 2010

  There has been a lot of buzz about Fireworks for comping and rapid prototyping since the introduction of CS4. It is supposed to be the bee’s knees for getting quick, attractive prototypes to clients. So when I had a web page design to do recently, I decided it was time to take Fireworks for a spin.

  

  Having never used fireworks before, I decided to look a bit into its capabilities for wireframing. The program is largely vector based, but has a nice blend of raster, making it a great tool that falls neatly between Illustrator and Photoshop without duplicating the functionality of either. I figured this would be the perfect way to design a site that required both wireframing and a complete design.

  The Good

  The first thing I noticed when using it is there are some really great features for web designers. I love the ability to create “Pages” that are separate from one another all in one document. You can do something similar in Photoshop with Layer Comps, but this feels to me like a much more mature way of doing it. And because each page has a seperate group of layers, the other pages don’t get out of sync when you change something (unless you’re sharing layers).

  

  In love with the "Pages" panel.

  I also love the guide measuring. If you hold down shift when dragging a guide you get the total and relative pixel count. This is the first thing that had me thinking I liked Fireworks and I honestly don’t know why all adobe products don’t do it.

  It also makes for extremely quick wireframing and (some) comping due to the vector leaning nature of the software. Much of what you work with by default is vector, so you can quickly and easily get a mock up done, and just as easily update and change it. I had to go through several revisions on the wireframes and final design, and Fireworks made it extremely quick and easy to allow for a rapidly evolving site design.

  The Bad

  Behavior can be weird at times. Sometimes selecting whole layers allows you to move its contents, sometimes you must select each object in the layer to do this. I had a symbol that kept disappearing for no apparent reason. I thought perhaps I was doing something wrong, but after consulting with a friend that has been using fireworks for a long time, we concluded it was a bug.

  It also lacks key features that makes manipulating graphics in Photoshop a breeze. The big one I see is masking. Fireworks has an archaic system where you have to past an object over what you want to mask.  Unlike Photoshop which has three flavors of masking- clipping paths, layer masks and vector masks, you’re stuck with this one way of doing it. You can’t even mask whole folders – if you want to mask a number of layers, you have to group them. If you want to change their position, you have to unmask then ungroup to do so.

  Then there are little work flow problems. If you create a symbol off of something on a page and put it in the common library, it disappears to the library, and you have to drag it out again. I’d think if you were making a button in place and saving it as a symbol to use elsewhere, you’d want to keep the original location. Or it would be nice to have the flexibility to share layers but change the position of those layers – layer comps in Photoshop, which is somewhat analogous to what fireworks is trying to accomplish, allows you to choose if each comp is going to record visibility, position and appearance, or any combination. I may want the same exact content in a different location. This can be solved using symbols, but its not as quick and easy to change as a layer is.

  Buggy

  Beyond the work flow problems, the software is not very stable. I experienced crashes only windows computer at work frequently, and once the problem was 95% done, it started crashing every few minutes. I don’t know if the fill was corrupt or it was just angry about the complexity of the designed site. It could open and modify the file without difficulty on my mac, so I am doubtful it was a corrupt file. Sometimes it would randomly decide not to save, but give no indication other than the asterisk after the file name remaining. I could be hours into a change before I realized it wasn’t saving.

  

  Oh Noes!

  After googling my problems, it appears that others have run into instability issues with fireworks. I a multitude of the adobe recommended fixes with no success.

  Conclusion

  I don’t believe I will be doing another project in Fireworks CS4. It had some really positive features, and the work flow problems weren’t impossible to work around. However, in the end, the buggy nature of the software and frequent crashes will keep me from dedicating any more time to it. Which is a shame, the software shows a lot of promise. Maybe CS5?

  
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