Bruce Bowman, product manager for Adobe Fireworks, kindly approached us about responding to some of the top Fireworks gripes – of course we’d love to share his thoughts with the Fireworks community, so here they are.
Fireworks Responses
1. Lose the fucking bloat already. #125
18. please don’t ruin fireworks with your bloat, it’s nearly perfect. #1653
Adobe: A lot of people voted for these two, but unfortunately, we’re not sure what exactly is meant by “bloat” and it is unlikely that everyone who voted for this one thinks that bloat means the same thing. Fireworks CS4 was the 9th release since the product debuted 10 years ago. Along the way, new features have been added with each release, and it has gotten bigger, in terms of the amount of code in the application, its footprint on disk and its footprint in RAM. Is this what you all meant by bloat? Or is it something else? We do work on keeping it lean, and did some good stuff in Fireworks CS4 – we significantly improved vector rendering performance, reduced install time, application launch and re-launch time, and the next release has even more of this coming. If we missed your point, then please tell us what bloat means to you. (This form is also for reporting problems/issues. We may not reply, but we do read every one of them.)
2. Change Fireworks so that font families work correctly. And let me type keyboard letters to search the font list when it’s open. #96
18.) 14. Please allow me to select a typeface in Fireworks by typing the name of that typeface. #1515
Adobe: We totally agree with this one, and also want Fireworks to be consistent with the other Adobe applications that have this feature. Its a high priority item on our to-do list.
3. Make it so that you can double click on gradient chips to set their colour. #426
Adobe: We agree 100%. We love this feature in Illustrator, Flash, etc. Thanks for bringing this up – it is now in our list of possible features for an upcoming version.
4. standardized type tool across all apps – and include table (and bulleted lists) support in that type layout engine. i mean–fireworks is a web design tool and can’t layout tabular data easily? #1038
Adobe: We don’t have a great answer for this, other than, you’re right, both of these would be really nice to have in Fireworks. For the second part of this, while not “ideal”, we do have an extension that installs a “Lorem Ipsum” panel, which has options to add normal bulleted lists inside a selected text block. Its not everything you want, but might be useful, so we are including it here. What are the features in the other products that you like the most and want to see in Fireworks? Use the form to tell us.
5. Please give Fireworks better text handling so I don’t have to use all two zillion megs of RAM running Photoshop just to make a simple webpage. #97
Adobe: Fireworks CS4 has a new text engine, the same text engine that is found in Photoshop, Illustrator, and other Adobe products. You should see improved performance and increased functionality in CS4. Make sure you update Fireworks CS4 to version 10.0.3 using the updater. You can get the update with Adobe Update. Or, if you’re an Adobe Update hater you can get it from here
I wanna add that alot of people aren’t thrilled with the Photoshop text engine – especially web designers who wanna match how browsers render type. – Adam, Dear Adobe
6. God I love Fireworks. Please, please, please don’t think that we don’t want fireworks with Photoshop out there. We do. #254
12. Fireworks rocks. DO NOT KILL IT LIKE YOU DID FREEHAND. #907
15. Don’t even think about getting rid of Fireworks #1891
16. Please love Fireworks. #1446
17. fireworks is awesome. thanks for keeping it alive. m4cr0m3d14 4eva! #1644
24. Do not kill Fireworks for Photoshop! Don’t do it. Please don’t do it. #103
Adobe: Thanks! When we add all of these similar entries on Dear Adobe, this by far is the number one “Gripe.” We love Fireworks too! When we design new versions of Fireworks and Photoshop, we know that each program is for a different type of designer. Sure there are some overlaps, but we’ve designed Fireworks to be streamlined for screen graphics production and tons of other uses that have come up in the last decade.
7. Please have an option of turning off the fade-in menus. #436
Adobe: We’re not certain, but are guessing that you’re referring to Windows Vista’s fade-in menus… If so, then this setting is controlled by Vista. Open Control Panel > Performance Information and Tools, and in the list on the left, choose Adjust Visual Effects and uncheck Fade or slide menus into view. You can tell Vista to Adjust for best performance while you’re here if you like. To get maximum UI responsiveness, go to the Appearance and Personalization control panel, choose Change Theme and select Windows Classic. Your UI will look more like old school Windows NT, but will be crisp and responsive and leave more RAM for other running programs. There is a cool little utility at http://tweakvista.com that allows you to get to some settings that otherwise are not accessible through the Windows Vista UI.
8. How about implementing wheel scrolling for the Fireworks panels? Clicking and dragging is a drag. #80
23. Why can’t I use my scroll wheel in the layers palette in Fireworks!!?? #1554
25. Please enable scrolling in Fireworks palettes already! #2300
Adobe: In Fireworks CS4, we added the ability to scroll using the mouse wheel in most of our panels, although in some you must have a selection before you can scroll, while in still others, you cannot use the mouse wheel to scroll (Shapes, Styles). This is still a work in progress, though we feel like we made this work for the most important panels first. Another nice workflow improvement in this area that we find not a lot of people have discovered is that there are new Contextual menus in the Pages, States and Layers panel, so there’s no longer a need to access menu items from the panel menu in the top right icon of the panel. Just Right/Control-click on e.g., a layer in the Layers panel, and choose the menu item that you want.
9. When can you improve the usability of Fireworks? Especially on Mac! #79
Adobe: This is too vague to be helpful, so we’re going to turn it around on you – what are your top 5 usability issues that you’d most like to see fixed? Fireworks CS4 made some significant improvements in usability, but we know there is still room for improvement and could use your input to help us prioritize. Use our feature request form. This form can also be used to report problems/issues. (We cannot reply to all of these submitted reports, but we do read every one of them.)
10. Who wants to draw a box with fuzzy edges? Not me. Why does fireworks do this? #609
11. Stop anti-aliasing edges in Fireworks randomly. There should never be a “half pixel” on a straight edge. #1815
Adobe: Check out this tech note and let us know if it doesn’t address the issue. We’re definitely working on several improvements in this area for the next release.
13. Fix Fireworks for Mac. You have cost me countless hours of work in crashes. #422
Adobe: We get the Crash Reports and have been fixing those issues as they come in. We also recently released the Fireworks CS4 10.0.3 Updater. This updater fixes most of the top issues, and improves stability.
Why did you make the text editor in Fireworks to be such a load of gash? In fact, why are so many things in the suite such a load of gash? #356
Adobe:
Ouch! (we had to go to Urban Dictionary to figure out what that meant…) The Fireworks CS4 10.0.3 Updater improved stability and fixed many of the top reported issues. Also check http://www.adobe.com/downloads/updates/ for other Adobe suite product updates. If you have the latest versions of the applications, and are still having problems, let us know. (Again, we do not reply to these submitted reports, but we do read and consider every one of them.)
20. Give me access to the same tools, effects, etc. in Fireworks as are available in Photoshop. Or please revive ImageReady. #1337
Adobe:
If you take a good look at Fireworks over the last 3 releases, you’ll see a trend – the application is improving in the look and feel and consistency with the other CS4 applications. In CS4 we did a lot of work to preserve design fidelity when moving data between Photoshop and Fireworks. Its now much easier to go from Fireworks to Photoshop, use those tools and effects, then return to Fireworks. If you have specific examples of a Photoshop tool or effect that needs to be in Fireworks, tell us about it, and how you would use it.
21. Can Fireworks CS4 not crash as much as its beta on release? I know it’s a beta, so it’s supposed to crash, but it’s not like you’ve never released unfinished code before. #357
Adobe:
We always warn and advise against using pre-release and beta software for production work. If you’re worried about the beta/pre-release builds crashing too much, then you’ve probably ignored our warnings. If you’re still having problems with the final CS4 release, make sure that you’ve updated to the latest version. And if you’re still having problems once you’re using the latest version, please let us know.
22. how often does one really put a stroke on a piece of type? the type colour option should default to fill. #4334
Adobe:
By default, new text objects have the same color fill and attributes as the last type object that was created.
