So one of my most favoritest designers in the whole wide world, Mr Jon Hicks, wrote a big assed article about Fireworks recently. It was fantastic to see, as my frustrations with Photoshop and Illustrator have come to a boiling point. At my office, we’ve been considering giving Fireworks a try, so this was a great heads up. Additionally, for those of you who read the comments on our Adobe responds to Fireworks post, you’ll know alot of FW faithfuls have been extra pissed at this new release. I think Jon captures not only the Fireworks crowd’s frustration but that of the Photoshop and Illustrator ones as well, here:
The problem is, after submitting the 20th crash report of the day, I’ve lost faith that anyone ever sees them or acts upon them. Overall, it feels like Fireworks is at the point of no return – no hope of it ever being fixed or improved, only that it will get more bloated, buggy, non-native and expensive.
Now I’ve been reassured time and again that Adobe is listening. I don’t think “Listening” is the problem; the problem is focus and politics. See before the Macromedia/Adobe merger, you could legitimately point at Adobe and say, “hey, make a graphics editor specifically for screen graphics”, since neither Photoshop nor Illustrator were “meant” for it. Once Fireworks entered the mix though, they had an answer. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to be taking development of it seriously, pissing off those who want to see it flourish, and those who want to see it replaced by something better by not getting rid of it (like, a Photoshop / Illustrator hybrid).
Adobe seems more concerned developing next generation technology like Flash Catalyst which is cool ‘n all, but doesn’t get the job most designers are doing everyday done much faster or more reliably. I want to give Fireworks the ‘ol college try, but if it’s as unstable as everyone says, that’s pretty disheartening. Meanwhile, Photoshop is getting more and more bloated while not adding much to the screen design side of things, and Illustrator still can’t render a single bloody pixel. Adobe needs to reconsider what their workhorse solution is for screen graphics for professional designers, or more people are going to start taking the competition seriously.
Fireworks is much more the next gen interface and interaction design tool than photoshop (which is meant for single image editing) and illustrator (which is meant for fine vector work). Adobe has lost focus a bit when building Catalyst, which in my opinion is way too limited and seems more meant to push Flex as a developing platform, than to really give us a tool for interaction design.
So yes, you should try Fireworks, and maybe like me you’ll never return to Photoshop ever again.