Monday, April 28, 2008

Fireworks Joins the team

My teacher at Humber, Jim Babbage, is a big fan of Adobe Fireworks. During our CSS classes he suggested Photoshop addresses the world of paper and print while Fireworks caters to the web environment. Fireworks takes the place of ImageReady, the little web images program included with earlier versions of Photoshop. After trying Fireworks during my XHTML class last fall and now in the CSS class, I ended up buying a copy.

Fireworks offers tools to quickly and easily size and optimize web images - I recently took on redoing an older web site for practice and was horrified to discover the designer had provided large images of various sizes for the site. Each time the site was viewed, the browser was forced to resize every image on the fly -  shoehorning them into thumbnails in table cells. Fireworks made short work of creating a set of decent thumbnail images and converting the odd jpeg to gif to allow some transparency (I skipped using png files so older browsers wouldn't have problems). 

In addition to the simple sizing and optimizing tools, Fireworks has very powerful tools for prototyping a new web site - even allowing the viewer to "click-through" the various pages to test the navigation design. Once a design is approved, the mock-up can be readily sliced to make the actual headers, backgrounds, buttons, etc. to join HTML, CSS, and Javascript to create a live web site. 

Like  Flash and Dreamweaver, also acquired when Adobe bought Macromedia, Fireworks has a GUI that is somewhat different than the traditional Adobe programs. Some of the image adjusting tools, like curves, look much like those in older versions of Photoshop, while other tools are unique to Fireworks.     

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