Category Archives: Design & Development

A Quick Review of Fireworks CS5

Unless you’ve been hid­ing under a rock, or you are not a Web designer or work­ing in a related field, you can­not have missed the announce­ment of Adobe’s new Creative Suite 5 a few weeks ago. I have been using two prod­ucts in the suite for a while now, includ­ing of course, Fireworks CS5. As is becom­ing a tra­di­tion here on pix​e​lyzed​.com,…

Windows Font Management Just Got a Lot Better

Over a year ago, I posted an arti­cle describ­ing my Font Management Woes and my search for the per­fect font man­age­ment appli­ca­tion on the Windows plat­form. For many years, that mar­ket has been dom­i­nated on the Mac side mostly by Extensis Suitcase Fusion and for good rea­son. Suitcase is a fan­tas­tic font man­age­ment appli­ca­tion with both server and…

Now is a Good Time to be a Fireworks Evangelist

I could not imag­ine my cre­ative process with­out Adobe Fireworks. I have been using that appli­ca­tion since ver­sion 2.0 some­time in 1999. 10 years ago, Fireworks was not an obvi­ous choice but the work­flow advan­tages over Photoshop were imme­di­ately evi­dent to me and my cre­ative process never was the same. Unfortunately, it took almost all those years…

Rapid Prototyping Tools and Principles

Dan Harrelson from Adaptive Path has writ­ten a very inter­est­ing blog post titled Rapid Prototyping Tools and what makes good prototypes. My long time favorite Adobe Fireworks is men­tionned along with Axure RP Pro (which is a newer tool in my arsenal) but also sev­eral oth­ers includ­ing online tools like Balsamiq Mockups. What is most inter­est­ing to me in the post is…

Axure RP Pro 5.5 Has been Released

The new ver­sion 5.5 of Axure RP Pro has been released a cou­ple days ago after being in pub­lic beta for a few months. It’s a very sig­nif­i­cant upgrade in terms of new fea­tures and is free for exist­ing cus­tomers with a cur­rent license. Noteworthy fea­tures include the abil­ity to load and cre­ate exter­nal wid­get libraries (sim­i­lar to Visio…