Every time I read the specs of a new version of Fireworks, I think, “that’s it, Photoshop is dead for web design, look at what this thing can do”. Then I use it, and I find the little things so unbearable, I never get around to trying out the big stuff. Indeed, in a recent ELATED newsletter, I was forced to backtrack from singing the praises of Fireworks CS3, and admit that I’d never moved to it from Photoshop, as I’d promised I would only a couple of months before.

So, will history repeat itself with this new beta version of Fireworks CS4, as released by Adobe Labs only a couple of days ago? Again, I’m looking at the features – improved styles, CSS and Flex export among others – and I’m thinking “if this works it’ll transform the way I do things”. We’ve been here before, and I’ve learned that without some fundamental reform of the way Fireworks interacts with users, I’m not shifting, however many bells and whistles it has.

You may wish to download the beta, which you can do at http://labs.adobe.com

Bugbears

Here’s a list of my Fireworks pet hates, some of which which I freely admit are derived from my long-standing use of Photoshop:

1) Interface: In CS3, only a mother could love it

2) Text handling: Terrible

3) Clipping masks: Non-existent

4) Layers palette: Barely functional. How hard can it be to disable a mask by Shift-clicking on it, and otherwise standardise interface functionality between Fireworks and Photoshop?

The new interface.

One much-needed tweak has taken place. Fireworks sports a nice new shiny coat of paint in the form of a new interface:

Fireworks CS4 Beta Interface

It looks nice enough, but after you play with it for a bit, you realise that really, everything’s still much as it was – the interface tweak is really only skin-deep. Palettes are roughly where you expect them, and the basic way Fireworks approaches user interaction hasn’t changed much.

For me, the Fireworks UI (User Interface) has always felt clunky, and the way you have to approach things hasn’t really changed. Obviously, for seasoned users this is great, as there’s no interruption in workflow, but I can’t help feeling that there needs to be a change in basic task-managment to push Fireworks forward and drive take-up amongst web designers, who mostly still use Photoshop.

A plus point is that the interface is faster than CS3, where I often found myself waiting for the interface to catch up, which is really pretty unforgivable in what purports to be a pro app.

One interesting question regarding the new interface elements is whether the other Adobe apps will follow suit. Adobe seem to to be creating an interface which is neither mac nor Windows, but rather their own, unique approach. Tools in the title bar? What are they playing at? In the end I think this is relatively unimportant so long as the apps work well, both individually and as a suite. I do think that whatever they come up with for CS4 should be the end of it for a couple of revisions, and that Adobe should then instead concentrate on features and fixes.

Text handling

One of my greatest bugbears with CS3 is that when you paste in text from another app, it retains the formatting of the original app, rather than using the style of the text area you’re pasting into. In practice this means that if you do a layout using dummy text and then want to paste new text into text areas, you have to reformat the whole lot. Maddening.

In the CS4 beta, things are slightly improved. If pasting from a text editor (in my case TextEdit on the mac), the Fireworks text formatting is honoured. The same from Word. If pasting from Photoshop, you retain the formatting from the Photoshop document. Good enough! That’s one thing to cross off the list.

Font rendering is still pretty iffy. Take the following grab, for example:

Fireworks CS4 Beta (Top) vs Photoshop CS3 (Bottom) text rendering

This is a mixed text area, containing two different type treatments. The top text is Arial Bold at 20px, and the lower text is Arial Regular at 12px. As you can see the rendering is, at best, poor. By comparison, Photoshop renders the text much more nicely.

One of the more interesting features of Fireworks is its ability to style text using the Styles palette. Essentially you get a text element looking the way you want it, and then you can create a style based on that which you can apply to any other text element. It’s great, but slightly hobbled by not being able to apply separate styles to different areas of type in the same text area. That means all your headings in a layout have to be separate from the body text, for instance. I regret to say that CS4 is as irritating as ever in this respect.

Lastly, you still can’t type the name of the font you want when in the font list to jump to that font. This is simply broken in CS3, and still is in CS4.

Clipping masks

I use clipping masks all the time in Photoshop. The basic idea is that you can mask off multiple layers using a single layer, simply by option-clicking between the two layers in the Layers palette. I use it all the time, for example by masking multiple blended photos to fit a header area. Fireworks CS3 doesn’t support this, at all, and neither does CS4 by the look of it. Instead we still have the laborious process of using the masking shape on each layer that we want to mask, to produce, what is in effect, something like Photoshop’s vector mask system. Want to make the mask 2px wider in Fireworks? Bad luck; you’ll be making the change on every single layer.

The Layers palette

Here I freely admit that Photoshop has affected my thinking. I am, after all, the co-author of the Photoshop CS3 Layers Bible, but the layers palette in Fireworks is simply broken in many ways. In CS3, for instance, if you shift-click to select multiple layers, it selects a random set of layers for you rather than the ones you wanted.

I know, I know, in FW it’s not a layer, it’s an object, but it’s in the layers palette, so for me, as a Photoshop user, it’s a layer. In CS4, the shift-click behaviour simply selects.. nothing. Actually, clicking on a “layer” other than the currently selected one does nothing either. So right now, you simply don’t appear to be able to use the layers palette to select an object/layer/thing. You have to hope they’ll fix this in the final version, so we’ll maybe give them the benefit of the doubt.

Generally I simply want the Layers palette in FW to be a bit more functional. Too much to ask?

After the storm

Right, that’s my major hitlist done. How did we do? Well, we sort of have a new interface, but it behaves in the same way as the old one, and we can now paste in text from text editors and have it take on the format of the current text in Fireworks. Everything else is as broken as ever, and in some cases more so.

Let’s give them some benefit of doubt. It is a beta, and as such is subject to change before it comes out for real, but I can’t help feeling that a lot of things that matter to me won’t change at all between now and the final release.

In the next article, I’ll be looking at some of the fun new features, starting with the HTML/CSS export functions..

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