[tomkin]

I hate to be that guy, but this is a real poor comparison. First, who uses guides anymore outside of print? 1140 Grid or 960 does the job perfectly fine and prepares your design for responsive.

You can write an article about Starcraft if you love Starcraft, but juxtaposing against Photoshop workflow is disingenuous at best, misleading and confusing at the worst.

Photoshop isn't perfect, but it knocks Fireworks' socks off in every aspect: automation, formats, shortcuts, UI, precision, etc.

[ricardobeat]

Until you need to use that PSD for production. There are a couple things in PS which make it terrible in day-to-day usage:

- no way to quickly export a layer or group on it's own with a transparent background (FW: click object, cmd+c, cmd+n, cmd+v, export) - can't copy layers with transparency to other applications - no 8-bit PNG export - auto-select sucks - takes minutes to load a 100mb file in an up-to-date computer with loads of RAM and scratch disk space. hangs when you move/resize too many layers at the same time - font rendering doesn't match system type at all

Not to mention that 99% of the time layers are not cut to size (have extra transparent padding) so you can't even get it's dimensions without a pixel ruler. That is, after you finally figure out which magic layer contains the actual objects. Please, make it stop :(

[smartwater]

I'm using Photoshop CS6 and I haven't had any of the problems you describe. "Save for Web" supports 8-bit PNGs. Exporting layers with a sequence of 4 commands isn't a burden. My Mac Mini loads up 100MB+ files all the time with no problem. I enjoy working with each pixel so I can make it pixel-perfect.

[ricardobeat]

Sorry, I meant 8-bit with alpha channels. The four commands are for Fireworks, I have no idea how to do the same in photoshop. PS is miles better for pixel-pushing, but that doesn't make of suitable for a web design workflow.

[tomwilson]

> Photoshop isn't perfect, but it knocks Fireworks' socks off in every aspect: automation, formats, shortcuts, UI, precision, etc.

Automation? Not really. The scripting Apis for both are similar. Plus symbols and styles are way more useful for UI design than smart objects. Plus you can find and replace colours. Woot.

Formats? Who cares. Fireworks does the ones that matter for web/app design.

Shortcuts? Subjective. Can customise pretty much anything.

UI I might give you. Fireworks is a bit odd in some ways.

Precision - not a chance..fireworks lets you type in the exact size of stuff you want oh so easily..

You should try fireworks sometime, it's pretty awesome.

As a dev, I love receiving a design in fireworks. It's almost a joy to work with when extracting all the bits I need. Photoshop is a pita (though I have written a bunch of scripts I use there to make it slightly less painful).