FireWorks 2.0 - Macromedia's 'Photoshop' For The Web
Karl Peter
Change your plans at once!
If you are a GoLive CyberStudio 3.1.1 owner and were about to take advantage of the Adobe Web developer bundle special offers open only to US and Canada residents right now, my advice to you is drop the ImageReady and ImageStyler components immediately. Forget about them. Phone Adobe back and change your order, or plan on getting GoLive 4.0 and anything else added to it other than IR or IS, because Macromedia's FireWorks 2.0 has fulfilled the promise shown in version 1.0 and is THE Web graphics and animation application. FireWorks 2.0 in combo with GoLive 4.0 is a formidable combination, and even FireWorks in synergy with DreamWeaver 2.0 is pretty darned good.
 
Why, why…why?
Macromedia took a version 1 product that had not a few rough edges, and planed them and rubbed them down until they took on a healthy shine. The confusions of version 1's interface such as the Windows-style long narrow Opacity and URLs toolbars have gone now and the whole thing has a much neater and more logical look. Gone are all the separate palettes often with just one function that so cluttered up your monitor, replaced instead with 4 multitabbed palettes that combine similar functions in a more logical way. The biggest difference between FireWorks and ImageReady, the only other vector-oriented Web graphics program out there, is that it provides a full set of drawing tools: Pen tool, Pencil, Brush and Redraw Brush for drawing brush strokes in a manner similar to MetaCreation's natural media drawing program Expression, Freeform and Reshape Area tools with resizable cursors for pushing those paths around, and the more traditional Scale, Skew and Distort tools.
Terrific tools
Then you have Line, Rectangle, Ellipse and Polygon tools for creating vector objects, and an excellent Text tool that beats most others out there including Photoshop 5's. I particularly appreciate the Path Scrubber (+) and Path Scrubber (-) tools that allow you to really finesse the brush effects attached to a path, by increasing or decreasing that effect on specific parts of the path. This accentuates the natural media drawing capabilities of the program. For editing bitmap objects there are Marquee, Ellipse Marquee, Rubber Stamp, Eraser, Lasso, Polygon Lasso and Magic Wand, and although FireWorks' developers have opted not to build in native pixel image editing they include the excellent PhotoOptics plug-ins that include a Levels filter as well as a large set of subtle effects plug-ins quite unlike any others I have seen. The only downside is that the preview image in the PhotoOptics plug-ins could do with being much larger. On the topic of plug-ins, you can use almost all of your Photoshop filters by pointing FireWorks' preferences dialog towards the location of your Photoshop plug-ins folder. I found that all my favourite (and there are a few of them) filters work perfectly in FireWorks. Excellent. All this means I can do a huge amount of original image creation in FireWorks as well as production-oriented editing and finessing, bypassing Illustrator, FreeHand, Photoshop or Painter unless I want to do some really heavy image origination work there.
Ô£øKarl-Peter Gottschalk,
SemperMac: The Australian Mac e-zine <http://www.sempermac.com.au>
