Macromedia Fireworks MX

We have a soft spot for Photoshop. Not only is it the best photo editing software on the market, but it's also an essential weapon in the armoury of any serious web developer.

Or at least it was. Fireworks MX from Macromedia is set to seriously dent its appeal to the semi-professional user. Photoshop will remain the tool of choice for print and high-end photo editing, but the recent growth in several key areas of Macromedia's image optimisation tool makes you wonder how Photoshop will compete in the web arena.

First up, there's the MX interface consisting of expandable panels, including a Property Inspector. A mass of common functions have been included in this context-sensitive strip, cutting down the time it takes to develop graphics for a site.

Take text editing, for instance, which in Fireworks 4 was a laborious process using the canvas and up to three palettes. MX's Property Inspector, though, puts every tool in the same place so you can edit text, change its attributes and position and apply effects from one palette. Text is also now edited on the canvas.

You also have the freedom to use obscure fonts, safe in the knowledge that an image of the text will be saved with your work and rendered on systems without access to the font itself.

Resizing the font-replacement image makes the text editable in a default font rather than rescaling it, which may or may not be a good thing. If you want to treat it as a vector graphic or imported image and resize it, you can't, but if you're simply proofing the document it allows you to make changes for reworking by the original developer.

They will have to replace the original font, though, when they reload the document on the original machine.

The tool strip has grown, and its fly-out menus now include blur, burn, dodge, sharpen and smooth tools, giving you more than just level control over how images look. The paint bucket has been joined by a new gradients tool, but the menus for this are not as clear as in Photoshop.

The pop-up menu tool now provides a clearer interface and supplementary options. Menu items and related entries are stored in a directly editable table, and menus can be vertical or horizontal and you can specify the width.

We thought one tool was a bit too ambitious. The reconstitute table function should, in theory, be able to rebuild a page from an existing table-based layout if you lose the original files.

In practice we had difficulties, as it refused to reconstitute pages from any of the sites we tried, citing invalid HTML as the problem. Fortunately, it seems happy to rebuild pages produced in Dreamweaver MX.

We were impressed by the symbol and library functionality when compared to version 4. Hitting F8 saves your symbol to the library from which it can be duplicated as necessary, and each copy tweaked independently.

Like Dreamweaver, Fireworks is an extensible product and, with an installed base of over 1.3 million users, there's a chance that, if a function doesn't exist, someone will produce it for free. One of the best recent examples of this is shipped with Fireworks MX.

This extension will read the data from an XML document, and combine it with a directory of images and a master document to produce new files.

Each will contain the textual data from the XML document, an image drawn from the directory, and the effects applied to the master document inside Fireworks. It's an easy way to produce a banner campaign written entirely in Flash.

The added functionality, improved user interface and new photo editing tools make this a serious threat to Photoshop. Macromedia's figures show that around 50 per cent of Dreamweaver customers also buy Fireworks. We wouldn't be surprised to see that climb with the release of Fireworks MX.

Price: £219 (£186.38 ex VAT); upgrade £109 (£92.77 ex VAT)

System requirements: 300MHz or faster processor; Windows 98SE, ME, NT4 (service pack 6), 2000, XP; 64MB of Ram (128MB recommended); 800 x 600 (256-colour) display; 80MB of available hard drive space.

Contact: Macromedia 01344 458 600
www.macromedia.com/uk

See also:

Macromedia Fireworks MX

A combination of vector and bitmap tools make this a unique solution for web graphics design.  31 Jul 2002

Adobe Photoshop 7

Quite simply the best photo editing program in the history of the universe.  15 May 2002

Micrografx Picture Publisher Professional 10

An impressive degree of creative power at a competitive price.  22 Apr 2002

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