Mucking Up the Fireworks?

A lit­tle while ago, Jason Santa Maria wrote a very inter­est­ing post about Photoshop and Fireworks (as well about Adobe in general…) in which he brings up many good points to which the pow­ers that be at Adobe should pay real close attention.

First, he admits that, although Photoshop is the Adobe appli­ca­tion he uses the most as he designs Web sites with it, at the end of the day, it really is com­pletely inad­e­quate for that kind of job. To me this is as true today as it was when I ditched Photoshop to use Fireworks years ago for the same rea­sons. Like me, many com­menters to his post don’t under­stand how so many design­ers still use Photoshop for site design or for any kind of lay­out work for that mat­ter (Web or print based). That is a sub­ject I have touched on here before and some­thing I often dis­cuss with fel­low design­ers. For all the incred­i­ble power Photoshop has for edit­ing pho­to­graphic images, it is indeed “woe­fully inad­e­quate” as a lay­out appli­ca­tion as Jason puts it. Comment #58 really nails it on the head as to why IMO.

But that is not the impor­tant part of his post for me. He then moves on to say that, after get­ting fed up with the tedium of doing lay­out work in Photoshop, he tried Fireworks again recently and real­ized that, almost 3 years after Adobe acquired Macromedia, Fireworks still lan­guishes and and still only gets pal­try new fea­tures at best, most being touted by how they inte­grate with other Adobe apps. This is where he hits a very sore spot for me.

Following on his first very valid point about Photoshop’s inad­e­qua­cies as a Web and UI design tool, Fireworks should have been the appli­ca­tion that truly filled that gap but in real­ity, it has not. We can blame this in a large part on Macromedia’s truly abysmal mar­ket­ing of Fireworks in the past and the fact that Adobe is not doing any bet­ter now, but in real­ity, the prob­lem lies much deeper than that IMO. I’m real­iz­ing that it’s really no coin­ci­dence that so many design pro­fes­sion­als still per­ceive Fireworks as ama­teur­ish because, in a lot of ways, it is. If we want to be hon­est, Fireworks has never evolved or matured in a sig­nif­i­cant man­ner after Fireworks 4. What truly inno­v­a­tive fea­ture has been added to Fireworks since then?

It has now lost its direc­tion com­pletely as Macromedia then Adobe can­not seem to decide if they want to make Fireworks a truly pro­fes­sional design appli­ca­tion that serves the needs of power users work­ing on real Web site design projects or a jack of all trade and mas­ter of none lite design app for week­end Web design­ers. I agree 1000% with Jason on this.

At some point, Adobe will have to decide either way and put real resources behind Fireworks’ devel­op­ment. If not, it will keep lan­guish­ing and will even­tu­ally die. At this point, I for one am already loos­ing faith in Fireworks and any­one who knows me knows how devoted a Fireworks evan­ge­list I have been for so long. But real­ity is catch­ing up with me.

As the projects I work on are get­ting more com­plex and as my design skills improve, I find Fireworks increas­ingly frus­trat­ing to work with for some of the same rea­sons I aban­donned Photoshop all those years ago. It is becom­ing inad­e­quate for larger projects. The pain points in my work­flow are not in the same places as they were in Photoshop, but they are very real nonethe­less and make me waste a lot of valu­able time.

For exam­ple, now that we finally have mul­ti­ple pages (let’s pass on the ridicu­lously half baked sin­gle Master Page imple­men­ta­tion), we should also be get­ting tools that speed up the edit­ing of the more com­plex doc­u­ments we’re cre­at­ing. I’m talk­ing things like text styles as in InDesign and Illustrator, but espe­cially, real color man­age­ment with indi­vid­ual color swatches which can be set as global col­ors. This means that if you apply a color to objects, text or effects prop­er­ties from a global color swatch, edit­ing that one swatch in the col­ors panel will cas­cade the change through­out the entire doc­u­ment auto­mat­i­cally and imme­di­ately. I’m not talk­ing about some­thing on the level of Illustrator’s LiveColor here but a truly basic fea­ture that has been taken for grated in all vec­tor design appli­ca­tions I know for over 2 decades.

On the last project I worked on, I got extremely frus­trated with Fireworks’ absolutely prim­i­tive color fea­tures when I needed to make color changes across a doc­u­ment to exper­i­ment with dif­fer­ent color schemes. With global color swatches, it would have been triv­ial but now, it is a real pain. This is just one exam­ple. Jason brings up many oth­ers in the later part of his post. I’m really skep­ti­cal now that Fireworks will ever get there so I’ve started explor­ing new avenues that will alle­vi­ate some of the more seri­ous pain points in my design work flow.

Recently, I’ve been think­ing a lot about going to Illustrator to do the actual design work and only bring those lay­outs in Fireworks for the pur­pose of slic­ing, opti­m­ing and export­ing graph­ics. I truly can­not stand Photoshop’s and Illustrator’s “slic­ing” fea­tures and “Save for Web” modal dia­log win­dow so I would have to keep per­form­ing those tasks in Fireworks. By doing this I would loose some of the inte­gra­tion advan­tage Fireworks has always given me (no need to move to dif­fer­ent apps for dif­fer­ent taks) but in the end, slic­ing and export­ing accounts for a frac­tion of the time I spend actu­ally design­ing Web site lay­outs and, in Illustrator, I would get real color man­age­ment, exter­nal assets link­ing, text styles and a much more sophis­ti­cated basic vec­tor edit­ing toolset.

If Fireworks does not bring a good dose of sophis­ti­ca­tion to its core design toolset very soon, I feel that’s exactly what I’ll have no choice to do. Many of us long time Fireworks users and evan­ge­lists have been more than patient with Macromedia and Adobe but my patience is run­ning out…