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Web Design & Productivity
Review: Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium
5/29/2007
Fireworks CS3
Fireworks, like Dreamweaver, has also received its share of jeers over the last few versions for essentially standing pat, and even though Adobe is attempting to re-focus Fireworks CS3 as a prototyping tool, the same criticism applies: Fireworks CS3 just doesn't offer very much. And despite muscling out ImageReady as the Web image helper app of choice, very little effort seems to have been made to bring Fireworks CS3 into the CS3 family. In fact, if it weren't for three very visible new features, one may be tempted to think that Fireworks 8 was being bundled into the CS3 product line.
First off, let me preface things by saying that Fireworks' traditional strengths--its uncanny ability to mix vector with bitmap images, its excellent batch processing and image compression tools, and its penchant for helping to create HTML and CSS-based sites out of source images--still remain. In essence, all the things that made Fireworks an excellent Web image production tool in previous versions are still evident in Fireworks CS3. Unfortunately, the interface to harness all this power is unchanged as well; Fireworks CS3, like Dreamweaver, eschews the CS3 interface in favor of the old-style, turn-of-the-century Macromedia panels. Now, on a Windows machine, it's not too terrible, as the single-window application paradigm in Windows evens things out a bit. But on a Mac? Ugh.
(Click for larger image.)
Again, there really isn't much to talk about in terms of new features; as I mentioned, there are really only three worth discussing in any detail. The first is the concept of pages. In keeping with Fireworks' new-found focus on prototyping, Fireworks CS3 adds a Pages panel, which allows you to create multiple page layouts in a single document. Each page can contain either its own layers or those that are shared across multiple pages, and you can designate a master page with elements that will apply to all pages.
You can also assign hotspots to specific page areas which link to other pages, and then Fireworks will export the whole shebang to HTML for easy review and perusal through a Web browser. That sounds nice, and the pages feature and HTML export work as advertised. However, the process to actually share layers between pages is extremely clunky and convoluted, often requiring multiple frustrating steps to ensure that a particular layer is, in fact, shared correctly. It does work, and work well once you figure it out, but the process is so strange that one wonders how any time and effort savings are possible, especially when you bring images over from Photoshop to begin with. Personally, this feature isn't going to get me to abandon the battle-tested Layer Comps feature in Photoshop anytime soon.
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