[Sigia-l] Fireworks vs Photoshop

[Dave Heller]

This is my blog comment:

I have made Fireworks my standard for screen design mockups. The
combination of vector and raster and its handling of text make it far
superior than Photoshop/ImageReady.

It has NOTHING to do with code though. I haven't used it for code
creation in about 4 years.

I can't use Photoshop any longer. I'd be doomed if you combined the
two in some way. They are just so different from each other.

Here are some of my favorite features:

1. Printing frames creates multiple pages if you print to PDF (Mac OS
version; I wish this was also in the PC version.) I live on this. Of
course I also hoped that there would be a lot better management around
this. If you did more on "page" management instead of this "hack" it
could be a real Visio killer. Having backgrounds (or shared layers) in
a more controllable (not all or nothing like it is now for frames) it
would be much better.

2. The fact that when I draw a rectangle it doesn't become part of the
canvas or the layer that it is on. This I guess you can call the
vector aspect of it. But I love this.

3. I think there is more that can be done with the Library/Assets
feature. I like it in spirit for creating a component set for my team
to share. The problem is that resizing components doesn't work the way
I want it to. It just stretches everything equally. What I like in
Visio is that you can create stencil items and tell it what sizes and
what doesn't so that for example if I create a scrollbar widget as a
library symbol, I don't want the top and the bottom to change size
ever, but just the bar part. it would even be great if fireworks
provided these components (browser components) that when you exported
to Flash or Dreamweaver it was able to interpret these component
widgets to work correctly in Flash (text box, checkbox, combobox,
etc.). But right now having the Library is a huge asset (pun on
purpose).

4. Like the Library the style area is also really useful. I do wish
this was designed better though so it acted more like a style sheet
and so if you tweaked a style after you already applied it to some
elements it changes those elements that you applied it to. Also, I
seem to have problems trying to create styles for graphical elements.
I've tried to use fill and border colors.

5. The features for exporting many types of images is just much
cleaner in Fireworks. The way you go into ImageReady first when you
say save for web drives me crazy. Fireworks is much better easier for
creating transparent (alpha channel) graphics than Photoshop. I love
how you can make the canvas a color and when you export it w/
transparency on and that becomes what your transparency anti-aliases
towards. If I don't want that, just leave the canvas as transparent
and it is very dynamic alpha channel transparency. It might be in
there in Photoshop, but I haven't found alpha channel transparency.

Really, in the end what I'm looking for is not a Photoshop killer.
Photoshop is great for well photos and that is what you should keep
focusing it on. it is really its core market. Fireworks should go
after OmniGraffle and Visio and just cut them down. There is no reason
that any designer should need 2 or 3 drawing tools for interface
design.

I also think that coding should be left to Dreamweaver and interface
graphic design should be left to Fireworks. While slicing is very
useful and so creating a table of sliced images can be nice (but who
uses tables any more anyway), I don't think its a big part of what at
least I use Fireworks for. I used to, but I don't think that many web
sites are designed this way anymore as there is more text than not
text and the text I use in mockups is usually for dynamic applications
or part of a CMS so exporting text in most cases isn't quite so
valuable.

Well, pppppplease! keep fireworks .. don't combine it w/ Photoshop,
and don't get rid of it thinking that Photoshop is enough. I'll be
doooooomed!

-- dave


On 2/23/06, Eric Reiss <elr at e-reiss.com> wrote:
> Andrew wrote:
>
> >I think of several small tasks a week that work faster/easier in
> >Fireworks than in PhotoShop - guess which one I would like to still
> >be there for me in 12 months time?
>
> I'd say batch compression of jpg files.
>
> Is there a prize?
>
> Eric
>
> e-reiss & associates
> copenhagen, denmark
>
>
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--
David Heller
E: dheller (at) gmail (dot) com
W: www (dot) synapticburn (dot) com