Dude, I feel your pain. I made a similar transition to Fireworks two years ago and it was like seeing the light of God. Stuff to try while you get tooled up for Fireworks:
- Use Background Pages instead of layers. Not sure how you're structuring your layers, but I tend to start with common elements and share those layers across the tabs I want. In Visio, this means putting those common elements on a Background page and setting it as the background for pages that will pick up those elements - Instead of Ctrl-Plus and Ctrl-Minus, try Ctrl+Shift+click to zoom in, and Ctrl+W to fit the entire page on screen (a crude zoom out). I think a Ctrl+Shift+Right-click does a zoom out, but I don't have my Windows-based work machine handy. Fireworks sales pitch: Using Visio to make flowcharts is tolerable, but for large-scale mockups, it falls flat. I let Product Managers run loose with Visio for smaller compoents while I tackle the larger parts of projects with Fireworks. It's not perfect, but it is many times more efficient than Visio, and you can set up 'slices,' regions of your mockups, to be exported for use in documentation. Want to show a cropped view of that pop-up menu? Piece of cake. Make a few edits to said pop-up menu? Just re-export and that image is updated. It's also easy to zip trough pages (PgUp and PgDown) to show people the various states of the app. A quick tutorial on Lynda.com (with a paid subscription) will get you up to speed in a day, or even a nice evening after hours ... Good luck, and let us know if you need more help! I'm sure the catharsis from your initial post was all you needed though :-). - Nasir ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
