Why Fireworks?
Written by Alan Musselman
Friday, 27 March 2009 02:44
Adobe Fireworks is a fantastic tool to create visually rich, eye popping user interface designs for all facets of the web industry and even extends into the product/manufacturing industry. Over the years I’ve worked on Fireworks I’ve had the honor to see how customers use Fireworks and lemme tell ya, it’s amazing to see what others do with it. From web interfaces to iphone to kiosk interfaces and devices to car audio players to LCD menu interfaces, Fireworks fits the bill for developers and designers that need to quickly bust out a visual mockup or need to create a click-thru prototype.
What is Fireworks ultimate secret to making Fireworks users successful? It’s easy to use!! To this day I am a strong believer in Fireworks saving you time and money on projects all around. Go read this article I wrote for the edge newsletter as a “Fireworks customer”. At the end of the article I listed “Easy to use” as one of my favorite features.
Quoting myself below:
“Another neat thing about Fireworks MX 2004 is that I can teach it to anyone in less than a few minutes — which means you can probably learn it on your own pretty quickly.
In my experience, once a back-end developer understands the workflow, they never go back to other products. After I show them how to use such an intuitive graphics program, I get nothing but compliments — and they get more money in their pockets, since they no longer have to rely on a graphics wizard to generate time-consuming, repetitive images.
I guess it’s obvious… I’m a true Fireworks believer. I’ve thought about growing out my hair again and walking the earth with my trusty wooden cane just to teach those cave-dwelling developers how simple Fireworks 2004 MX is to use for their projects. Sure, finding them could be hard, but the process would fun.”
There is more truth to this ancient article than you can see….I did grow my hair out again and I have been teaching cave dwelling developers the time saving features in Adobe Fireworks! My passion for Adobe Fireworks is immense and keeps getting stronger when I hear success stories from customers. Keep it real folks and get outside this weekend!
Alan! I totally agree that Fireworks holds the crown for many of the reasons you mention, BUT you shouldn’t be promoting CS4 until there is a patch made available for the text rendering issues. Sorry to bring this up negative issue on an otherwise outstanding product, but it’s a huge deal for many many people.
Will.
Agreed, Fireworks is very easy to learn. I teach beginner Dreamweaver classes and the student projects were pretty dull until I added a 20-minute session on Fireworks as a bonus topic. The students love it and it’s great to see the more creative work that gets submitted.
I also agree with Will’s comment. Fireworks MX, MX2004, 8 and CS3 were all solid releases – unfortunately not so much for Fireworks CS4. In fact the text issues with Fireworks CS4 is the main reason our office hasn’t yet upgraded from the CS3 suite to CS4 suite – Fireworks is too integral in our workflow to deal with the text rendering bugs.
@ Will and Bill:
We are almost ready to release the updater! We are verifying the fixes internally and trust me, we understand the need to get this out quickly to resolve the text issues. Thanks for the concern!
[...] April 4, 2009 by RuthK “Adobe Fireworks is a fantastic tool to create visually rich, eye popping user interface designs for all facets of the web industry and even extends into the product/manufacturing industry.”<!–more–> [...]
I’ve been sold on Fireworks since version 1! Still swear by it for my design work and my students love it!