I love listening to the adventure stories my brother tells about riding his ten-speed through America in the 70s. I asked him one time what he packed on his bike. He said he never packed anything that didn't have at least two uses. "A hunting knife, for instance, can spread butter, open cans, and defend you in a fight."
Although I never made a transcontinental bike trek and try to avoid fights with hunting knives, I often use my brother's philosophy when choosing tools. For instance in Web development: there are three tools which have surfaced in the last year which together provide professional Web developers with nearly everything they need for robust Web development: Fireworks 3 (graphics), Dreamweaver 3 (WYSIWYG design) and HomeSite 4.5 (coding).
In part one of this series, let's look at the graphics program: Fireworks 3 by Macromedia:
If you create professional Web site graphics, you probably have used Photoshop. As useful as it is, Photoshop is primarily a tool which came out of the print industry and has only recently (5.5) made additions for Web graphics. Fireworks, however, was made for the Web. Most everything that you appreciate about Photoshop is still there -- layers, a redo history, all the familiar tools -- but Fireworks extends these not only with Web developer extras (HTML code generation for rollovers and image maps) but with the typical efficient Macromedia features such as libraries, extensive macros, reprogrammable menus and complex behaviors. Fireworks 3 has emcompassing features which you don't see elsewhere, for example you can search and replace a certain color or font for all graphic objects in a sub-directory (!).
If I had to describe my overall impression of Fireworks 3 in one word, it would be "flexible". Nothing is written in stone. One of these flexible features is its ability to let you gradually reduce the size of a .jpg or .gif to visually determine its optimal size/quality ratio for your particular purposes. With this feature I have reduced some 25K jpgs down to 5K with almost no noticable picture distortion. This will save thousands of unnecessary download seconds!
But the biggest leap forward for Fireworks is that it is vector based, unlike Photoshop. This allows you to apply dozens of effects to a graphic object yet at any time you are able to continue altering the size and content of that object: no quality loss, no redrawing, pure flexibility. Form and content are finally separate.
One caution: if you have never worked with vector-oriented graphic programs before (e.g. Flash or FreeHand), you will experience a fairly steep learning curve with Fireworks as you come to terms with its vector-based concepts: paths, strokes, fills etc. The interactive tutorial that comes with Fireworks is informative but will not get you past this learning curve, nor does it even hint at the power and flexibility that you will experience with Fireworks if you learn it completely. I overcame the learning curve in a week with the book Fireworks 3 Visual Quickstart Guide. It's a small book that gets right the point and marches you through all the major concepts and features of the Fireworks for both Windows and Mac. Vector is a new way thinking about graphics, but when you grasp it, you realize that it is perfect for our reduced bandwidth Web -- you will see, pages made with Fireworks can look complex but come up fast!
If you haven't tried Fireworks 3 yet, get the Quickstart guide, get Fireworks and advance to the next stage of graphic design for the Web today.
