On Jun 3, 2009, at 11:34 AM, David Drucker wrote:
1) Most UI work involves moving around objects, whether they are buttons, fields, labels, blocks of text or other graphic elements. Fireworks is essentially a vector environment with some bitmap tools, which is pretty much the reverse of Photoshop. This means that if you are working with a design, doing iterations, and someone suggests a button be moved or a field expanded, in Photoshop it often meant some bitmap editing, unless you want hog-wild with a layer for every single solitary element.
Can you be more specific? Making a button longer or a field wider requires editing no matter what, they are just different approaches when you need to do the editing. Also, if you group things into folders, you get an object-like behavior in Photoshop, with regard to the major transformation tools.
3) Fireworks' native file format is PNG. That means that you can circulate images to Business types who have no graphic software to speak of, and they can still see your files. This has been a sometimes-yes, sometimes-no situation with Photoshop over the years. PNG is a nice file format to work with for a variety of reasons; it has built-in lossless compression so files aren't huge when you are sending them back and forth, it has transparency, and it supports as much colour as you need (unlike GIF or JPEG which lose quality for either of those reasons). Its a big win when you can say to a client that you are always working with PNGs, so they can see things at every step of the way, instead of flattened proxies.
What about file size in transport? Is that not a concern?
4) There are several graphic effects, notably bevels and drop shadows, that were helpful in UI design work (although they often have become a bit overused, in my opinion), but the fact that they were, up until recently, only non-destructive in Fireworks was a help. Again, these also appear in Photoshop, but they are again, for each layer rather than on an object by object basis. The ability to copy and paste object styles while in the early design stages is a great way to see a large set of elements in different colours and tones quickly.
I'd have to see more specific examples to see what you mean in context. In Photoshop, you have to build up the effects to create certain visual treatments so you actually want them to be non-group specific, at least in my experience. That's how you arrive at subtlety and richness on the visual side.
5) Fireworks has more recently included a lot of the active guide features that Omnigraffle had. These are a god-send for doing quick, drag and drop UIs because alignment and centering is pretty much done on-the fly.
Those active guides in Fireworks have been in Illustrator since 1997 (or was it 98?). I remember working with Martin Newell on implementing the feature back then. I'm of two different mindsets with Smart Guides... I absolutely love them at certain critical points, but sometimes I find they get in my way too much. I had assumed the Fireworks team grabbed the Smart Guides code from the Illustrator team or used the feature from Illustrator as the basis for theirs, but I could easily be wrong there. Smart Guides have gotten much better over the past 12 years, but still need some major refinement on the behavior side.
6) For large, complex projects, Fireworks' Image and object style libraries helped me make sure that colours, bevels, shadows, and other elements were always consistent from drawing to drawing. The image library can include an entire widget set, and their new 5- slice resizing ensures that even if you make a button longer to accommodate a longer string of text, the rounded corners don't become a different scale or in the case of a bitmap, start to blur.
This is the biggest reason I know why people love Fireworks, and I have to agree it's the kind of thing that can make the choice a deal breaker for some. I've never been fond of libraries only because I find them too tedious to maintain over the long-haul of a project or too limiting in making everything I do look cookie-cutter. But for large amounts of grunt work, they are certainly a massive productivity boost.
7) Fireworks provides a multi-page document format that lets you generate clickable PDFs (or you can export a series of pages to a series of JPEGs or GIFs, if necessary) so that you can delivery prototypes easily. For web projects. I find that 90% of the communication that I need to make about UI layouts and sequence can be handled by these prototypes.
This is the other big reason, as Nasir also stated. This was the reason I tried many times in the past to use FW, but the type and grouping issues always drove me away in the end.
I remember Deneba Canvas (as well as Superpaint - remember that?). Don't know about Studio/8, but as far as I can tell, if Adobe keeps Fireworks as more of a Web prototyping tool (and, I suppose, an Adobe Air and Flex prototyping tool), I think it will do well.
This is the crux of the problem, and the reason why I asked the question. I don't think the tool makers need to keep creating a "web" tool. What the world needs now is a real robust *SCREEN DISPLAY* design tool, one aimed at all the things digital and pixels to allow you to do all that you need visually for the display, mixed with the statefulness and random access behaviors that code requires to truly design a professional grade interface for any software product, regardless of medium; web, RIA, desktop, mobile.
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