On Sep 16, 2009, at 6:58 AM, Brian wrote:
why would I use [Fireworks] over using Photoshop or InDesign?
This is how I think about where Fireworks fits relative to other Adobe
apps:
- InDesign is great for creating documents
- Photoshop is great for working with bitmap images
- Illustrator is great for working with vectors for print
- Fireworks is great for working with vectors to create bitmap images
for the screen
They all do other (and often overlapping things), but that's a very
high-level view. Another way to look at it is that over time Photoshop
has added vector tools, while vector and bitmap tools have been in
Fireworks' DNA from day one. A few of the things that I find make
Fireworks great for wireframing:
1. Pages, states and layers. You can share layers across states and
states across pages. And you can show or hide shared layers/states in
different states/pages. Not sure if this makes sense in the abstract,
but it's really handy and probably the main reason I use Fireworks.
2. Styles. Update a style and you can easily update all objects with
the same style.
3. Symbols. Create a symbol then drop pointers to it wherever you need
it. When you edit the symbol, all the instances get updated. Symbols
be very simple (a button with 9-slice guides that allow you to smartly
resize it for any one instance), or they can be very sophisticated (a
button with a normal, highlight and default state and variable text
for the label).
There are lots of other little (and big) things, but these three stand
out for me as particularly helpful for wireframing (and creating final
art, too).
-Adam
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