What About that Fireworks CS4?

Although the new ver­sion of Fireworks has been in pub­lic beta for a while now, I haven’t talked much about it here yet. Not because it’s not an excit­ing release, quite the oppo­site, but only because until a month ago I was basi­cally work­ing 2 full time jobs and since I turned a full time free­lancer, I’ve worked hard at set­ting up my new busi­ness, re-​branding its image and get­ting into my free­lance groove. I’ll talk about all that later but I’m just say­ing that I just did not have the time to write any­thing mean­ing­ful about Fireworks CS4. This post is just a start.

Anyone who’s read this blog before or had to “endure” some of my long winded tirades about Fireworks’s devel­op­ment and direc­tion in the last few years knows that I just haven’t been happy at all about a lot of what hap­pened and a lot of the deci­sions that have been made dur­ing the devel­op­ment of the last 3 ver­sions. On one hand, I have been a long time evan­ge­list of the prod­uct but, on the other hand, one of its harsh­est crit­ics as well. That’s because I care about it… a lot. Fireworks is one of the rea­sons I was able to build a nice Web design busi­ness for myself on the side while work­ing a full time job in the print­ing indus­try. It enabled me to work faster and get ideas into con­crete form eas­ier than with any other graphic appli­ca­tion I’ve used before or since. So it has long been a key part of my tool-​set and now that I do this full time, it’s becom­ing even more impor­tant to me.

But there is a lot to be happy about in the new CS4 ver­sion. It still misses some long requested fea­tures but it has finally started mov­ing in the right direc­tion again and actu­ally made a huge leap forward.

If you do not want to down­load and install beta soft­ware and are not inter­ested in read­ing lengthy new fea­tures descrip­tions, please just take a few min­utes to watch this video on Adobe TV that fea­tures Alan Musselman (who is an appli­ca­tion archi­tect from the Fireworks team) demonstrating some of the key new fea­tures and improve­ments in Fireworks 4.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve been this excited about a new Fireworks release but this one really is a fan­tas­tic and worth­while upgrade. Beyond the UI changes, most of the new fea­tures go to work flow effi­ciency and ease of use which have been Fireworks’ main strengths from the begin­ning. With this release, it’s really start­ing to shape up like the cre­ative pow­er­house appli­ca­tion it was always promised to become. I can’t wait to see how much fur­ther Fireworks will jump with the CS5 version…