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by whywhywhywhy 2880 days ago
> it was incredibly powerful, especially for the time period we're talking about

Fireworks was also doing this around the same time but seems to have been completely been forgotten because of Photoshops dominance.

3 comments

Similarly, Fireworks felt like it died the day Adobe acquired Macromedia. While it had a number of versions released after that it never felt like it was getting very much attention. A shame.
Yep, it still is puzzling why Fireworks never got the recognition it deserved -- the amount of unnecessary suffering UI designers went through for 10 years they could have avoided by just switching tools is mind boggling.
I don't think it ever got enough recognition for handling UI designs and everyone just gravitated towards Photoshop or Illustrator.

I think its heyday was when HTML table layouts were still how you had to layout websites and it's slicing capabilities were really convenient. I suspect that was the killer feature for a lot of people but once CSS layouts took over, Fireworks really fell out of favor and Adobe never bothered to reposition it as a UI tool.

I still use it to this day for my limited editing/mockup needs. The new workflow seems to be mockup tool (like Balsamiq) -> Photoshop design -> HTML/CSS, but for my needs, I can get reasonably close enough in both layout and design in Fireworks just do Fireworks -> HTML/CSS.

I don't know if a tool that is close enough to Fireworks to be a good replacement has come around, but I know it's definitely not Photoshop, which I find far too complicated for the basic tasks I need.

Macaw felt close to Fireworks, but is now sadly discontinued (although one can play around with the last released version): http://macaw.co/
Macaw is now Invision Studio - http://macaw.co/invision/
I absolutely loved Fireworks, and it was mind boggling to me why people were using Photoshop at the time which seemed painful for most UI work.

I've gone from Photoshop (1st version was 4.0 that I remember) -> Fireworks -> Sketch

It's still available if you dig around on Adobe's site.

Despite having the full creative suite I still turn to Fireworks for quick jobs sometimes when I need to do a fast crop or slice job, or put together a simple 'constructed' image element.