Adobe Fireworks

Adobe Fireworks (formerly Macromedia Fireworks) is a bitmap and vector graphics editor. It was originally developed using parts of Macromedia xRes, which Adobe acquired in 2005. Fireworks is made for web designers for rapidly creating website prototypes and application interfaces. Its features include slices and the ability to add hotspots. It is designed to integrate with other Adobe products such as Adobe Dreamweaver and Adobe Flash. It is available as either a standalone product or bundled with Adobe Creative Suite. Previous versions were bundled with Macromedia Studio.

User interface

Fireworks' user interface is consistent with the rest of Adobe Creative Suite, similar to that of Adobe Photoshop. On Mac OS X, it is possible to display the application in multiple document interface mode or the standard viewing mode where all toolbars float freely on the screen.

Features

Hierarchical layers

Fireworks supports layers in graphic files. A layer is an area on which image can be painted. Layers are initially transparent. Each document may have multiple layers. The final image is formed by the combination of the layers, with the contents of the upper layers obscuring that of all underneath. Layer facilitate contents composition in a complex graphical work.

Layers in Fireworks are hierarchical, meaning that each layer may itself comprise other layers. This hierarchical structure facilitates layer management when the number of layers in a complex work increases.

All the layers can be accessed from the Layers panel. Layers may be wider or taller than the image itself. However, the final image is produced by hiding those areas that exit image boundary.

Smart guides

Fireworks supports guides, horizontal or vertical lines that act like a real-world ruler to help drawing, content placement and image composition. A user may place one or more guides on the image at any time and use it as a visual aid. For instance a guide is useful when a piece of text must be placed in line with another graphical item. Additionally, the user may enable the snap feature of the Fireworks, which causes objects (pieces of image, text or layers) drag to the vicinity of a guide to snap to it.

The smart guides however, are not placed by users. They are areas of the image that may interest the user such as the image boundaries, middle of the image or general boundaries of another object. When a user drags an object, Fireworks tries to guess what the user intends to do with the object and draws temporary visual and placement aids. This feature was added with the release of CS4.

Symbols

Reusable elements can be designated as symbols and placed at multiple pages or on the same page. When the master symbol is edited, Fireworks propagates the change to all instances of that symbol.

9-slice scaling

This feature ensures that rounded rectangles maintain their roundness when transformed depending on where the guides are placed. CS4 has this feature exposed as a tool. With this feature introduction in CS3 version, its usage was limited to symbols.

Image optimization

Fireworks was created specifically for web production.Since not every user may be in possession of a fast Internet connection, it is at the best interest of the web developers to optimize the size of their digital contents. In terms of image compression, Fireworks has a better compression rate than Photoshop with JPEG, PNG and GIF images.

Adobe Creative Suite integration

Fireworks understands the Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator file formats (.psd and .ai files) as well as Encapsulated PostScript format (.eps files).

Export

Fireworks can export images to multiple file formats including PNG, JPEG, GIF, Animated GIF, TIFF, SWF, BMP, WBMP and PDF. It can also export to SVG (with the help of a free Export extension) and FXG 2.0.

States

Previously known as frames, states are used for animation purposes. They are also used for defining behaviors in cases of symbol buttons like Up, Down, Over.