Boomworks

Adobe, please don't take my Fireworks away

Your average computer nerds tend to be loyal to a fault - whether it's loyal to a platform, a programming language or a brand, we just can't help ourselves. I continue to have Mac vs PC battles with my print colleagues, but no matter how many times they fork out their hard-earned beer money for another version of Mac OSX that is still incompatible with their font management software, I don't expect things are going to change in a real hurry.

Since the boom and bust days of the dotcom era though, when everybody was buying out everybody else, we've all had to learn to swallow our pride. We've had to adopt and maintain a healthy respect for pretty much every brand, because who knows who might own who else tomorrow? Who remembers those Cold Fusion developers who once scoffed at Dreamweaver users, and eventually had to become Dreamweaver users themselves?

Of course there are some types of package that are kind of interchangeable, or are at least designed for the same purpose, such as InDesign and Quark Xpress, and Illustrator and Freehand. While most of us have a preference for one or the other, it's fair to say that you wouldn't turn down a job on the basis that the studio used InDesign instead of Quark.

For some reason, though, a lot of web designers think that Photoshop and Fireworks are similarly interchangeable. This continues to astound me, because they are two completely different tools that just happen to have a few overlapping features. They both have a place in web design, but their roles should be respected.

Photoshop was originally created as an image editing and manipulation program. In later releases it has incorporated web publishing features, sure, but its real strength is advanced photo editing. I am still in love with Photoshop, and every release gets me very excited - don't get me started on the healing brush and patch tool or I could be here all day.

Fireworks on the other hand, was built from the ground up specifically for web page design, exporting graphics and even code generation - not that I can vouch for it's code generation, but that's another topic entirely. It combines vector based illustration and bitmap editing, as well as more advanced text formatting and editing. I tend to avoid photo editing in Fireworks, but in a pinch it is more than capable of handling the basic stuff.

With every release of each program, the features overlap a bit more - most of us could technically get by with one or the other - if I was forced to design an entire site using Photoshop I could do it, but it would take me a great deal longer without the advanced features of Fireworks. Things like the symbols and assets library make global changes effortless. Being able to find and replace text, fonts and colours in multiple files is something I'm not sure the architecture of Photoshop will ever be able to achieve. The ability to move guides and objects by entering page coordinates offers precision a lot faster than Photoshop. Even basic things like aligning objects I just take for granted until I have to use Photoshop.

My partner has a multimedia studio, and he was one of those loyal Photoshop users. For years he spurned Fireworks, and I gave up trying to convert him in the end. When Studio finally bundled Freehand, Flash, Dreamweaver and Fireworks together, he found himself with several Fireworks licences that were sitting dormant on machines around the office, and I guess economics prompted him to finally give it a go. He came home about a month later like he'd suddenly found religion. Each day he'd say 'Did you know Fireworks could do this?' or 'Have you seen how it can do that?' and I'd shake my head and sing my little 'Sam's always right' song (there is also a dance that goes with it).

For the shareholders of Adobe and Macromedia, the announcement that Adobe had purchased Macromedia must have come as very welcome news. For Fireworks users, it was a very bleak day. Many web designers may simply refuse to try Fireworks - because they already know how to use Photoshop, and they insist that it can do everything that Fireworks can, despite never having actually explored Fireworks thoroughly. Since the merger of Adobe and Macromedia, I am yet to read any concrete statement about the future of each company's products, except for some general excitement about the possibilities for Flash and PDF becoming more inter-dependent.

I keep waiting for the announcement that they will be 'consolidating' their programs, and Freehand will be absorbed by Illustrator, and that Fireworks will become redundant in favour of siphoning off some of its features and tacking them onto Photoshop. If enough designers are adamant that Photoshop can do the job of Fireworks, then what is to stop them doing that? From an economic perspective it would certainly make sense, even I can see that.

Watch me in a few years, though, I'll still be using Fireworks MX2004. That'll learn em.

Submitted by Sam on June 28, 2005. Posted in Design