[Sigia-l] Fireworks MX 2004 as a prototyping tool

[Listera]

For those of you who do UI prototypes, this might be of interest.

Probably like most of you, I have been a Photoshop user for a long time.
(Actually, in my case, long before version 1.0 by Adobe, as a utility for
Binuscan.) Since I know every nook and cranny of Photoshop cold, I reach for
it at the earliest stages of UI prototyping, and have never paid much
attention to anything else out there for well over a decade.

I'm not a big fan Macromedia's rather sloppy and unpolished approach to UI.
(I'm especially frustrated by the abomination a.k.a Flash, given its
enormous potential.) Anyhow, probably like most of you, I haven't considered
Fireworks.

Due to a recent project in Flash MX 2004, I picked up Fireworks MX 2004, and
I must say I am thoroughly impressed. So much so that all the visual part of
my prototyping work has completely shifted from Photoshop to FW.

Since pretty much everything in FW is and remains as vector, it's very easy
to change stuff, to a degree Photoshop can't match. Doing rollovers, URLs,
buttons, widget behaviors, slices, tables, hierarchical nav menus, etc., are
all dead easy and powerful. With editable styles, it's easy to quickly
prototype stuff in lo-fi and selectively apply styles to objects to give the
client a taste of the final look/possibilities in hi-fi.

Bonus: most of the stuff you do for web is 80%-95% identical to how you do
them in Photoshop, so the learning curve is very flat, and you can pass
files with layers/text/groups/etc all intact between the two apps. That FW
works in tight integration with Dreamweaver and Flash is the icing on the
cake.

I don't have any stake in Macromedia and I'm not claiming FW has no rough
spots, but overall, if you do this kind of work, you owe it to yourself to
check it out. There's also a 30-day free trial:

<http://macromedia.com/software/fireworks/?promoid=home_prod_fw_082403>

----
Ziya

Design is the art of gradually applying constraints
until only one solution remains.