hello, my name is
nathan pitman.

I’ve been using Fireworks from the beginning and I, too am heart broken. This product has been suffering from diminishing returns since Adobe took it over. I am no longer going to purchase this product…I’m just done supporting their profit margin with this heap of garbage.

@StephenV: Hi Stephen, good to hear from you! :)

I have to say that I don’t think posting about a personal opinion on my own personal blog could ever be considered a mistake and whilst I may have been involved in numerous pre-release cycles with Adobe that was not the case at the time of writing this post. In addition I’m sure the talented folks in the Fireworks Team are able to take criticism, after all I’m not suggesting that Fireworks is a bad application, just that it could be so much better and maybe some healthy competition is what we need.

With regards to my membership of ‘Team Macromedia’. I was asked if I wanted to continue participating in the programme some years ago (before Adobe) and decided against it but for some reason it seems my profile has not been removed from the website. Thanks for bringing this to my attention – I will ask that this is rectified.

So, do I owe Adobe anything? Yes… I owe it to them to be honest about how their products make me feel, specifically a product which I have been a long time advocate of despite it’s shortcomings.

In respect of your comments regarding Fireworks itself I was in no way suggesting that the efforts of evangelists such as Matt should be ignored or that existing functionality was not improved upon, I’m just suggesting that in this day and age where web professionals are dealing with a complex mix of XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX etc that Fireworks in my opinion (and it is only that) might be better off focusing on it’s creative tool set.

As you rightly point out Fireworks already has an API so why not let features which sit on the perimeter of the products focus be added by third parties, invest the limited development time which is available between marketing cycles in ensuring that the core product is rock solid.

I understand that software development is by no means an easy task and that you cannot make everyone happy all of the time but – I also believe that the Fireworks Team are capable of delivering a product that could blow us all away… if only they were released from the marketing driven product cycle!

Though I do agree on the suggestion that some of the webdesign-features could be better and bugs should be fixed, I don’t follow the statement that FW is too much of a prototyping program.

I read someone saying that FW should fill a niche, well for one thing prototyping and wireframing is a niche that should be filled.  And FW fits perfectly.  With the upcoming Catalyst, FW will have an important role in prototyping applications.  And that’s what Adobe is aiming for.

FW will be more of a prototyping program than an end-solution provider.  You can’t expect to build a website without coding, you need coding.  FW is for design-use and slicing, not for making a complete website.

I don’t really feel there is anything missing, if one could point out what exactly I’m very interested to hear it.  But taking a step back and removing all those prototyping features?  No thanks!

BTW for all those complaining there is an interesting feature called EXTENSIONS, develop what you’re missing, maybe it’s helpfull for us too.

Nathan,

I couldn’t agree with you more. I’m one of the people who posted the text bug back in early January. I’m actually really anxious about some of the improvements and features they’ve rolled into CS4. However, to not release a fix that so many people are obviously rendered useless with seems like a big blow to people like us that use this program everyday.

I don’t really want an alternative to Fireworks. I just want them to make a version that works.

-Demetre

I have so badly been waiting for anyone to come up with something new and complete in image editing. There are many neat little editors, but none of them really stands up to the task of 100% professional usage.

Yet Apple gives us core graphics and many libraries that are really crying for someone to make a Photoshop or Fireworks killer.

Pixelmator is not really the right way in my opinion because it tries to be a 100% Photoshop clone (even down to the keyboard shortcuts) with slightly more modern underpinnings. We need a new paradigm, and that’s where I see Acorn is shinging.

I find it to be more effective and smooth to work with than all the other small image editors. However its lack of features always have me crawl back to Photoshop.

I don’t use Firefworks because you have to “mous around” too much to work with it. There are just not enough keyboard shortcuts and the workflow just doesn’t fit me.

I understand you are frustrated Nathan, but I think posting this is a mistake. It is surprising given that you have been on the inside track as it were with Adobe in the past:

http://www.adobe.com/support/forums/team_macromedia/team_members/218.html

So I think you owed them a bit more than such a public and divisive statement.

Firstly, we should be grateful that Adobe decided to retain and invest in the product at all. But thankfully, they have decided to put their money where their mouth is.

While I understand your frustration, I think your arguments are ultimately misplaced.

To my mind, Adobe are not distracted by rapid-prototyping because Fireworks was created as a rapid-prototyping tool from the get go by Macromedia – it was designed for creating table based layouts. The slicing and export you referred too was created for precisely this purpose, right back in version 1.

The only reason vectors and bitmaps were combined so uniquely, was because Macromedia thought this would make it a better rapid-prototype tool for doing stuff like animated gifs and changing web page layouts.

The reason a new text engine was added – was because people for years and years asked for it.

The javascript menus you mentioned have been in there since version 3… to clarify thats the version 3 that was released in 1999/2000. So existing functionality was only being improved on in CS4.

The export to CSS export you refer too was developed by an community evangelist – who wanted to improve the product, not Adobe:

http://www.mattstow.com/

Matt, frankly, did a great job. Adobe supported him, but you’re looking at his own sweat off his brow here.

And the Flex support? That merely leverages the inherently reusable scripting language, that the developers so thoughtfully opened up to the community in Fireworks 1 – the same scripting language that Matt tapped into for the CSS export, and you have tapped into in the past to create cool extensions. It was hardly a massive time sink for Adobe to add it, and shows exactly how flexible the Fireworks platform can be for so many different users.

As commenters here have pointed out, these features you dismissed as unimportant, have become very useful features for them.

In conclusion, software development doesn’t turn on a dime or at the whim’s of it’s user base. You cannot make all people happy all of the time. And improvements to code takes time to realise and bugs take time to truly squash.

I for one, am grateful that an enthusiastic and committed team at Adobe want to keep improving this product. I for one, still love this product, warts and all.

All the best,

– Stephen

I’m totally behind you – vive la revolution!

Well said Nathan!

I hope this gets to the developers attention. I would hate to say goodbye to FW because of lazy programmers and such. I’ve been on the tracks since FW CS3 and back then I really enjoyed the rapid tools and GUI-handling but I wasn’t able to export properly to Photoshop… then the bug-legendary CS4 arrived and though it exports rather smoothly it sucks on so many other basic areas! But PS is so dull and slow to work around with… so please give us the fix we need people!

Please count me in on the alternative apps (beta-testing)

Cheers,

/Henriko

Wow, what a huge response. I’ll try to answer all your comments but please accept my apologies if I miss yours.

@JohnOxton: I think you’ve summed it up in simply using the word ‘lightweight’. Whilst Fireworks is by no means a bad product at heart by trying to cater for too many audiences it’s losing traction with the market it was originally devised for. It’s no longer lightweight, that’s the problem. RE your idea of a place to put together a list of ‘must have’ features for the ‘holy grail’ product we’re all after… I’ll see what I can do.

@KleanthisEconomou: I agree, Fireworks 4 was great. Refined and focused on a single simple objective. Great to hear from you!

@Yves: Bloated. Unfortunately software developers like Adobe are petrified of removing features. This is however what Fireworks (amongst other CS apps) really needs. Say goodbye to superfluous non professional features and the application very quickly becomes more focused. A nice side effect is that devs get to focus more time on worthwhile features and bug fixes.

@RyanRoberts: Totally – web designers need an equivelant to Panic Coda / MacRabbit Expresso.

@MariusBastiansen: Lets hope, though I realise is by no means an easy task to undertake. Maybe 12 months from now the market might be a different place.

@AlMacmillan: Adobe really need to move away from a marketing driven release schedule and get back to developing great software for web professionals.

@RoertWetzlmayr: I have no doubt that the Fireworks Team are listening, but I think they are under pressure from above to tick boxes for the CS5 marketing campaign. If they were released from this format I have no doubt that they could strip Fireworks back and turn it a the focused and solid design tool.

@SergioMora: Your comment is enough. Thanks very much. :)

@Michel: I agree that a patch is desperately needed for Fireworks CS4 and despite this letter I have not lost faith. I think that Adobe have the resources available to them to deliver but I’ve been thinking that for god knows how many product cycles now.

@JimBabbage: You are absolutely right that Adobe have indeed found a niche for Fireworks but as you point out this has stolen attention away from much needed improvements to the basic tools (now years overdue). I too am hopeful that Adobe are already on the case but I think a bit of competition would do them good.

@CraigErskine: Understand your frustration RE the bugs. It would be great to see some of these outstanding issues resolved in a point release.

@Christoph: I think some of the Mac only devs (Panic, MacRabbit, Pixelmator Team) could do a great job, taking advantage of technologies like Core Image (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_Image).

@JeffWhitfield: I did give Pixelmator a shot and whilst it looks very promising it’s not quite there in terms of providing a blend of bitmap and vector tools as you identify. Export for web is the other biggie that’s missing.

@rolfsf: Imagine what Panic could build… indeed!

@Julik: Very interesting to hear about development of the Mac version back in the Macromedia days. I was using Windows back then (shudder).

@rogerwilco: Yes, the core tools in FW are without doubt great. It’s all the fluff, bugs and lack of polish that detracts from the experience these days.

@Ethan: You are right that the Rapid Prototyping is indeed a very useful aspect of the product for designers and developers working with Flex. However as noted elsewhere, the attention the product has received in this area has had a detrimental effect on basic maintenance which the product really needed elsewhere. My opinion (and it is only that) is that Adobe need to focus on ensuring that the existing feature set is solid, polished and well implemented before even considering new features.

Well, I for one have to say that i like the rapid prototyping slant of the tool. I use it a lot with Flex and hope they add tight integration with Flash Catalyst so I can take the GUI from FW to FC to FB smoothly. Sorry to not agree with you but I think it should continue to be a solid Interface builder for the many platforms/languages it supports. I was hoping that they would add XAML/silverlight support to give the MAC a decent native tool.

I do agree that the text bug needs fixing, I just don’t think it needs to be dumbed back down to just a image editor with good slice tools. That would be a HUGE step backwards. Maybe they should produce a FW elements that fits what your describing.

Commenting with a nod of agreement. Photoshop does the trick for me but there is indeed a market for a webdesigners’ design app.

@KristofDrossaert: I totally agree with these statements:

You can’t expect to build a website without coding, you need coding. FW is for design-use and slicing, not for making a complete website.

...and…

BTW for all those complaining there is an interesting feature called EXTENSIONS, develop what you’re missing, maybe it’s helpful for us too.

Fireworks is at it’s heart a design (prototyping by another name) and slicing tool and anything which falls significantly outside of that arena could be added using the API and the Extensions platform.

I totally agree. I have been saying for some time on John Nack’s blog that Adobe really are at risk of smaller, better designed and less bloated (not to mention less expensive) apps eating away at their market share. Given that many people pirate copies of Adobe products when they are students (come on, you know we have all done it at least once in our student careers) and that then making the leap to a young freelancer with legal software can be prohibitively expensive, I wouldn’t be surprised if people turn to smaller apps and then realise they don’t really need to extra features of Adobe. This may, of course, be different in a larger studio but I find myself using Pixelmator more often than Photoshop these days.

I’ve been using Fireworks more and more still go back to Photoshop for dealing with text and heavy graphics. The other thing I dont like its how Fireworks uses the Windows color picker.

As a long time Fireworks user, I’m pretty heart broken by the whole thing. CS4 isn’t just bad… the damned thing is unusable. I’ve completely given up and gone back to FW8.

I jotted down some of my thoughts here

I agree with the post in some respects. We use FW for everything we create – our entire workflow depends on it.

The feature set is good – but Adobe simply need to put ALL of their efforts into performance and reliability now. It’s akin to what Apple are proposing with Snow Leopard – just do what you do now, but make it lean, fast and reliable.

The problem for Adobe? Hard to sell this as an upgrade… CS4.1 should focus on this though: I’ve long felt that a decent competitor could own this market if they tried. To be honest, I can’t believe that Apple themselves haven’t added something to their Pro suite – they have all the necessary tech in other products.

I think that the UI is right, I like the “one window” concept (the same as Coda for instance). You can always switch to a multi window model if you want.

The typography bug however is really unbelieavable. I don’t really understand why one basic feature as having well formated texts in a page is flawed.

Awesome Post!

I agree completely.

2 Things I hate!

1) It took forever for Adobe to add decent PSD support. As any Fireworks fan knows opening other designers PSDs can be depressing. Resulting in you having to open up Photoshop and preform some surgery.

2) CS4 has the following GLARING BUG WHICH I HATE!

With the Selection Tool, Make a selection. Then Using SHIFT + DRAG you can ADD to said selection. Now Before releasing hold SPACE BAR, this will let you move the selection around before committing it. This is actually one of my favourite things. Same applies for ALT and SPACE to subtract from the selection and move around before committing.

Enter CS4…. HOLDING ALT and then Pressing SPACE gives the NEW STUPID fireworks icon menu focus….

ARGH!

People who don’t USE fireworks shouldn’t be allowed to work on it and turn it into another shitty over-bloated and buggy application. :(

Email me if anyone discovers a better app for us Fireworks lovers.

WHY?

I’d love to use Fireworks but I just find I can’t work as quickly with it as I can with Photoshop. The new UI is CS4 is an improvement as I really think the CS UI works well but having tried the CS4 beta of fireworks I still found myself unsatisfied with it. It just seemed very cumbersome.

I agree that the guys at Panic would excel at making an app to best Fireworks but judging from this it looks unliekly that they will anytime soon.

I am in total agreement with the sentiments towards FW. It “was” the most light weight, nimble vector+bitmap app for web design – with a faithful following. Photoshop is not a replacement for this type of work, it is good at what it was originally intended to do – photography. The whole workflow with FW is adapted for web work. Adobe seems to turn its back on this community. I have not upgraded to CS4 due to all the negative feedback from the design community. And now I am looking at other alternatives (like Pixelmator).

@STEVEN V

OK, so listen up, everyone. You, loyal customers who have followed Fireworks since its early versions into its current state, shelling out hundreds of dollars or more with each successive version—the SOLE reason the product (and company) exist in the first place – need to just shut up and be happy they made a Fireworks CS4 at all, according to Stephen V. Because after all, the product exists solely as a post-merger charity to all of you.

The “just be happy you have something at all” argument is ludicrous. Show me any company that developed this sort of apathy for their customers —that stopped responding to customer demands and trends of the industry they supposedly serve (or as Stephen puts it, “the whims of its user base”)—and I’ll give you a lot of companies that are down and/or out. Like IBM. Or the entire U.S. auto industry for that matter.

Fireworks may have been designed as a rapid prototyping tool in the beginning, but the Web design industry has changed SO much since version 1.0, that its initial intention – a table-based layout production tool, as Stephen V puts it, no longer applies. And this trend has been a long-time coming. I have purchased and read books on Fireworks 4 and MX – written by Macromedia Press – that clearly tried to position it as a graphic editor and Photoshop competitor. So this notion that it’s always been what CS4 is today is somewhat untrue.

And I think this is the whole point – we want this product that we fell in love with and pay good money for to stay relevant to what we do. Users of Fireworks span a diverse continuum, but we all overlap at a certain core set of features we need – solid bitmap and vector layout tools, a text engine that works, and the ability to slice and export for the Web. Whether you care about the other tools or not, you NEED this core to work. And right now that core is being ignored in lieu of other features that pertain to a smaller group of users, but are “market-driven” as Nathan states.

Equally irritating is the defense that the new text engine is what users asked for. Really? I would think first and foremost people would want a text engine that WORKS. I don’t think people are against the engine itself as much as they are against the fact that it’s utterly broken and renders the product unusable for them. That a product would leave the door in this state is sad. That it’s been almost 6 months without any resolution what so ever tells me a lot of Adobe’s priorities and how they value their customers. Bugs that have been around from two versions ago STILL rear their ugly head from time to time.

But thank you for the new perspective, Stephen V. Instead of insisting that the feature set Adobe sold me on when I shelled out my hard earned cash actually work as advertised, I should just sit back and thank them for the time they DID spend on it, and be grateful that time amounted to anything at all. I should instead just happily accept whatever and I am handed (and perhaps, as the text engine is concerned, be careful what I wish for).

After all, we’re just paying customers, what right do we have? So on behalf of everyone here, I would like to ask that you please excuse our “whims”. We’re very sorry. It won’t happen again.

Fireworks CS4 does one thing very well and very often; and that is crashing.  I’m also not impressed with Photoshop CS4. Some things that worked just fine in PS CS3 are now buggy in CS4. (try zooming in really tight, then making a marquee or crop selection and dragging it off screen. Very finicky scrolling and the rulers don’t move. lame )

@Andy Polaine: What is expensive?  3000€ for a Master Collection to me is cheap.  How many designers use the whole Master Collection? Few, but if one wants it all it becomes more expensive offcourse.

Let’s say a designer earn 65€ an hour … that is roughly 500€ a day.  So a weeks work to pay a whole Master Collection… Saying that Adobe has put years and years work into it.

And I never count the VAT, that’ll make it even cheaper.

For someone that does this as his/her profession it’s not expensive and well worth the cost.

We don’t want another new UI, XHTML and CSS export, a JavaScript pop-up menu generator or a new type engine. We just want a product that is 100% focused on allowing us to put down on the canvas what we are imagining in our heads and then slice up and export that for use in a hand coded layout. That’s it.

I’m not even responding to this quote, I just thought it was so good and perfect and pertinent that I wanted to see it again.

The only thing about a FW competitor is that for all of it’s bloated bugginess, FW does a lot of things very, very well. It handles vectors like a champ, the Pages palette is very helpful for comps, and the UI for slicing is almost perfect (much better than how PS handles slices, IMO).

FW is full of bugs ever since the MX version hit the streets. Back then Macromedia outsourced the carbonization process to some Bangalore devs, and lost the “tab lawsuit” which forced them to revamp the UI. Ever since then Fireworks is a broken, hopeless piece of software miscarraige. The sole idea of the Property Inspector that does not update when you change objects is an example of QA that has largely disappeared.

I hope our prayers will be heard, brother.

I haven’t upgraded or even tried CS4 yet, so I’m glad to read about it’s failings before I drop any money on it. I’ve been a Fireworks convert since the very first release, and have always appreciated it’s intended focus on web design.

If a worthy replacement – lean, focused, with the balanced vector/bitmap approach shows up, I’d switch. Imagine what Panic could build (granted, mac-only, but that’d be fine for me)

@Eric: Agreed. I think Pixelmator is very close. If they added ‘shapes’ and ‘web layers’ for setting export prefs for document regions they would pretty much be there.

I’m ready for this too. Pixelmator is SO close in my opinion, but its still a better photoshop replacement than anything else. Great UI in that app. They need shapes and I’m more or less sold. Maybe a spin-off product or something targeted at the web/UI crowd.

I couldn’t agree more. Adobe lost the plot a long time ago and the swallowing up of Macromedia didn’t seem to improve things. I feel Adobe is becoming like Microsoft. CS is their ‘Office’ and their obsessed with foisting their proprietary technologies (flex etc) into all their programs and hoping we’ll all update EVERY year. I hope PANIC are listening or MacRabbit.

I certainly agree. Hope someone with developing hands are thinking in the same lines as you.

I can’t tell you how much I support this!

Currently we have Fireworks, Photoshop, Gimp and maybe a few other insufficient apps to choose from. Web designers really need a dedicated app to do exactly what you say.

Truth well told. I’ll be one of the first to abandon Fireworks – the bloated bug monster.

Hey Nathan – been a while, but sure is a small world. I came across this post through a link a friend gave me. As you may know I haven’t used Fireworks in years, with Fireworks 4 being the last of the mohicans in my opinion. I see things haven’t changed much.

Anyway this brought up memories, so I thought I’d say hi.

Best,

Kleanthis

Well put Nathan. Please, add me to the alpha testing list of any lightweight, usable alternative!

@Olly: I have already written to the Pixelmator guys but not Acorn, I’ll drop them an email. :)

Good points Nathan. Have you considered getting in touch with the Acorn and/or Pixelmator guys? They’re both relatively new lightweight image editors that might be adaptable to the task (with the addition of a few features).

Hear, hear! Totally agree, though I’m very reluctant to expect Adobe to listen.

another thumbs up from a long time Fireworks lover.

I currently use Fireworks MX for my own use at home and see no reason to upgrade. I have Fireworks CS4 at work but it’s bloatware. The “new features” are as good as useless for day to day stuff, and it’s soooo much slower to run.

Hear hear!

A thoughtful article this. I recently learned to work with Fireworks (jumping straight in with version CS4 so I really can’t compare to previous versions). There’s a lot to like about it and as a layout tool I prefer it to Photoshop now. But I agree there are a lot of superfluous features (I handcode, so all the css and html export functions are just unnecessary IMO).

Pixelmator is a nice app, but what it really needs is some decent “export for web” options, as far as I’m concerned that’s one of the few things holding it back for professional use.

It will be interesting to see if some software devs take up the gauntlet being thrown down here :)

Nathan, how about a spot to try and gather a features list?

Been using a combination of Pixelmator and VectorDesigner. Granted, VectorDesigner does have it’s limitations but I can still whip up a design pretty quickly for the kinds of designs I do.

I’m not big into most of Adobe’s stuff anymore. They’re getting to the point where they’re as bloated as Microsoft Office. I’ll stick with the light and nimble stuff that get the job done, thank you very much. A couple of hundred bucks is much better than $500 to $1000+. Rather save my money than have to use bloated software. Granted, I still use Photoshop and Illustrator…but only when I have to open client files from design companies. Other than that, pretty much use Pixelmator and VectorDesigner for my own projects.  :)

Adobe is worse than Microsoft, far too expensive.

With the money you spend on an upgrade you can buy 5 to 10 different apps of other companies.

And another big minus for Adobe: They don’t focus on the mac. The software they produce looks nealry the same on Windows and on Mac. I miss the look and feel of a native OSX app.

As to the idea of fireworks: If it wasn’t there when buying Macromedia, they wouldn’t care a fig for it.

This is one of the 4 deal breaker bugs that has prevented me from upgrading to CS4. There are so many little things that got introduced in CS4 that didn’t exist in CS3. The brand new vector engine is the other big one. It produces objects that are not pixel perfect anymore. The sad thing is that every single bug that has prevented me from upgrading was reported many months before CS4 shipped.

It makes me wonder why they even have a beta testing team. Every bug I reported was swept under the rug so they could release at a specific date.

I’m more in line with Michel on this issue. Yes, I agree that text issue NEEDS resolving, sooner than later. But I haven’t abandoned the application.

I disagree that CSS and other integration features should be ignored. They should be developed while the ongoing concerns are also addressed. The issue with a lot of this will be in how the documentation and marketing is handled.

Make FW faster – please yes. Improve the graphic tools – YES! And give FW it’s own niche, where it can flourish and be unique – definitely.

Macromedia wasted far too much time comparing FW to PS. That was a losing battle, from the get-go.

Adobe at least has seen a direction for FW that always existed, but was never really spelled out or had any focus. Is it perfect? Nope. But it can be made better. Feedback on posts like Nathan’s can help.

So, I’m not giving up. I will keep using it and I remain hopeful that Fireworks can be made even better..

The last 3 versions of the CS have been a patch over a patch from the first version. Adobe should really sit down and think about each and every paragraph of this post.

Very well written. I love Fireworks, and despite the CS4 shortcomings continue to prefer it over Photoshop. Your sentiments echo mine completely, however. While the aesthetics of the new type engine are great, the “shift” bug is just flat out terrible. I’m dying for an update, and in the meantime would be completely open to exploring an alternative or two. Again, well said, and thank you for saying it.

I really do hope that Adobe releases a patch for Fireworks CS4, which will address the text shifting issues. I can also say that I did not lost faith in Fireworks, because up to version CS3, this was the best graphic design app out there. I am a Web designer, and I need simple, yet powerful vector+bitmap tools for my graphic design work for Web, and then I can easily slice the graphics and handcode my own CSS.

Fireworks is simply the best app in its own niche. I am just a bit saddened that lately it doesn’t receive as much attention from Adobe as it should. The imperfect release of v. CS4 is just an example… :-/

Maybe things will improve again? I hope so… My design world is filled with Fireworks, I can’t imagine working without its everyday help:)))

I just upgraded to CS4 and I’m a bit disappointed in how hit and miss it is – not at all what I expected…

There aren’t words for how tired I am of Adobe products (Fireworks included). The entire Adobe Creative Suite is a horrendous Mac OS X Citizen and all of the applications feel like foreigners on the Mac; ugly, bulky, slow and terribly buggy. I tell you there is a large hole of opportunity encompassing Adobe’s entire design suite-Adobe products have become awful and many of us would pay handsomely for some alternatives that smelled and tasted like “Apple” tools.

Agreed. FW under Macromedia was a game-changer; Adobe has really dropped the ball. There’s nothing quite like it: PS is great and necessary but for web-specific purposes it lacks a lot of FW’s strengths and charm. There’s bound to be a competitor in the works soon--Pixelmator looks especially promising.

I feel like Adobe and the other big software companies have overlooked the newbies and the occasional users with these bloated, too expensive packages.

There is a huge demand for a basic, affordable package that doesn’t take months of frustration to learn to use.

They should use this basic package as a gateway to the more advanced products. Start small and simple and earn your customers.

I’m tired of being neglected by the Big guys.

Thanks for letting me vent.

Yep, I sure wish were were a stripped-down version of Fireworks available, which just did graphics, and was cheaper/faster/simpler.  Makes me wonder what goes on inside huge companies like this, that they just keep piling on “features,” until the user interface is so dense with teeny-tiny options cluttered all over the place, it makes it very geeky and depressing to work with—not a good thing for a design tool, in particular.

So, how about it, Adobe?  A greatly simplified version of Fireworks which has nothing but the most useful tools in it for web developers.  Call it “Sparkler” (a small Firework).

Hi, guys…

I’m really happy to see this post and all the comments.
I started a thread on getsatisfaction some time ago, asking Panic to do something about it, and having read all this I encourage you all to drop by and ask them too!

Aren’t we all just _too_ tired of Fireworks?

I’m using Fireworks CS4 on Mac and have noticed a really annoying bug which I can’t say I’ve seen documented elsewhere. If I’m using the export wizard and I have more than one document open in Fireworks it doesn’t always export the document I’m working on. It’s pretty annoying at the best of times.

A few weeks ago I commented here on Fireworks, just as I was on the verge of buying it (or something else).  After several weeks of using it, my opinion has changed.  Bottom line, it’s the best there is, and you have to compliment Adobe for that.  As for the $300 price tag, while that is a big chuck of change to cough up, in hindsight it was money well spent, given how useful of a tool it is for being a professional-quality website builder.  I’ve spent $50 on software in the past, which left me feeling it was a rip-off, because ultimately it was useless.  Not so in this instance.

I’d still like to see the user interface polished up, and if there are bugs in it they should be fixed.  But again, it’s the best there is, and so I want to thank Adobe for it, and to encourage them to continue refining it.

The Adobe Fireworks CS4 team has released the much awaited patch to fix some of the big issues related to text and stability. The update can be downloaded from http://www.adobe.com/support/fireworks/downloads_updaters.html . The automatic update from the application through Adobe Update Manager (AUM) is also available.

After applying the update, please ensure that the version screen now shows as 10.0.3.011. Please spread this information so that users who might be affected can benefit from this announcement.

The Fireworks CS4 10.0.3 Update is now available. It fixes many bugs (including the text shifting problems) and is much more stable on Mac and Windows. You can get it via the Adobe Update Manager, or from http://www.adobe.com/support/fireworks/downloads_updaters.html where you will also find release notes with details on the bugs that this updater fixes.

Adobe does care about Fireworks, and the Fireworks users’ needs. It hurts, but we need to hear this kind of feedback in order to understand how to improve.

Many users are reporting that after applying the update, they are much happier and enjoying a much more stable and enjoyable Fireworks CS4.

Bruce Bowman
Fireworks Product Manager

I’m posting my Adobe crash reports on Twitter…

#AdobeCrashReport

It is hearing story after story like this. And stories of how unstable Photoshop has become that have kept me from updating to CS4. Who needs it? CS3 has so many functions that I have yet to discover so when I read the feature docs on CS4 I figured there was nothing there that I had to have. Been using Fireworks since it was Macromedia and love it. But sometimes it feels like Photoshops Bastard cousin that Adobe no longer loves…

I’m with you man, especially on the “need for an alternative"…
As I see Adobe constantly making wrong decisions, I can’t wonder but think Adobe might turn into the next “QuarkXpress”: great product, dead in the water (now trying to “come back")! It just feels they’re putting all their eggs on the Flash/Air basket and developing their other apps in relation to that. For that reason, FW is being turned into an “AiR Graphic Design” product…

I really hope that Adobe gets the hint from all this HTML5 convo around the web, and understands that *designers and developers* make the future web, not software products… (Microsoft is now waking up to that.. Too late IMHO)

I never upgraded to CS4 and I’m glad I didn’t. I hope Adobe starts taking FW a little more seriously or this app is simply going to die.

So sad.  Really want Adobe software but can’t afford it.  I think many start ups struggle with the costs.  I’d be really happy if new retail licences came out based on number of employees in a company.

I don’t see a FW alternative in the short term.

Been looking for this Fireworks alternative for several years. Will be watching the competition to see who stands up to take its place.

cool story bro, but Adobe’s software rocks !