Fireworks is far, far better for UI design, both for native apps and for web apps. I wished I'd discovered it a long time ago. I hardly ever even launch PS anymore but I use Fireworks all the time.
I'm one of those casual users who maybe uses an image editing program a few times a year. I also found Fireworks to be a much better tool for these tasks.
Last week was another of those times when I needed to open a graphic and tweak a logo for the web. But I have a new laptop now, and didn't want to pay for Fireworks or go through the install just for something that I use so rarely.
So I decided to try out Inkscape and although it has a klunky X11 interface, I found it does everything that I need. Not bad for free software...
Even Fireworks is overkill if you do these kinds of things that rarely but it's certainly a lot cheaper than Photoshop and it's paid for itself several times over in my work.
That's funny you should say that, I initially started out using Fireworks when I started as an intern as a web developers. This was back in 2000, and designs were all table based, so Fireworks was great for splicing into the required segments.
I'd have to agree that Fireworks is probably better suited for most web design needs... It used to be real simple to switch between the 2 packages, guessing it is still the same...
Last week was another of those times when I needed to open a graphic and tweak a logo for the web. But I have a new laptop now, and didn't want to pay for Fireworks or go through the install just for something that I use so rarely.
So I decided to try out Inkscape and although it has a klunky X11 interface, I found it does everything that I need. Not bad for free software...