hello, my name is
nathan pitman.

Have you tried DrawIt yet? http://www.bohemiancoding.com/drawit/index.html

@Sean: In my opinion Fireworks is far superior for website design because it allows you to combine vectors, bitmaps and non-destructive effects.

@Simon: I’d totally forgotten about DrawIt! Have seen it before but not tried it for some time, I’ll take some time to look at that again…

@Simon: It looks like the team behind DrawIt are also working on an app which is more focused on Vector tools. You can download an early beta here: http://bohemiancoding.com/download/sketch.zip

I’ve got to say, I’ve never really understood the appeal of Fireworks. The rendering is dreadful, not only for text but also when it comes to zoomed shapes. I like the mix-and-match of vectors and bitmaps, but I’d still sooner use Photoshop for basic layout scamps (although I’m increasingly moving towards roughs in PS and designing much more in the browser).

Frankly, I think Adobe needs some serious competition in all areas. It’s pretty much doing a Quark, but we all know how XPress improved after InDesign appeared. Imagine if some other company brought out a genuine Photoshop competitor (which, frankly, Pixelmator really isn’t).

@Craig: Type is now actually rendered with the same engine as PhotoShop I think (CS4). With regards to rendering of objects, Fireworks is a vector based tool but it renders objects at a pixel level (unlike Illustrator). Personally I think they should have made this a document based preference but I suppose that would have stolen market share from Illustrator.

All of the above being said though Fireworks does suffer from some real issues in terms of sub-pixel shifting. Often when you transform an object it will shift to be sat between pixels, resulting in a washed out render - but there’s nothing you can do to correct this. Sucks.

Craig - I agree on the FW thing. I’ve never used it until recently until I started working in a team, where it’s a good base for all.

Only Apple could “do” Photoshop - it’s just such a big app. FW is a different matter. 80% of the app could be stripped out. My wish is that someone with the class of Panic would take it on.

Nat: I really don’t understand why the DrawIt people are doing Sketch.

@Simon: Absolutely agree that 80% of Fireworks could be stripped out, there’s so much fluff that’s been introduced over the years. I’m also not sure why Sketch exists in addition to DrawIt, it would seem more logical for the two to co-exist as one application.

@Simon - The problem with Apple having a go at Photoshop is that it’d result in two things: a Mac-only app, and Adobe perhaps ditching Photoshop for Mac (or at least making it second-best to the Windows version).

Adobe seriously needs some competition, though - and fast. CS4 was a mediocre upgrade, and the stand-out apps are the ones that were good in the first place. Stuff like DW, on the other hand, is now looking horribly dated.

Hi, Nathan and the rest of you guys. I’ve been following this and previous posts as well as the general feeling on the same issue for a long while now.

There’s a conversation going on at Get Satisfaction with the developer of DrawIt, and he’s listening.

Those of you who feel like encouraging him on taking the app beyond, please drop by:
http://getsatisfaction.com/bohemiancoding/topics/finally_a_posible_fireworks_alternative

i’ve worked on multiple programs across multiple media on multiple platforms for the last 12 years.

fw is better than ps because of:

- page templates
- pages
- selection (right click select behind)
- symbols
- smart objects
- unified expandable text box
- smaller documents, smaller memory overhead
- scripted commands

ps is better at:
- masks (clipping groups)
- layer masks
- slices (try exporting a single slice in fw)
- layers ui

add proper masking to fw, better slice exporting and freehand-style textboxes and adobe might just regain some lost friends.

I am a full time GUI designer and have been using Fireworks for over 8 years. The CS4 version must the buggiest software I have ever used. I have had to install an AIR app which auto saves my work every 5 minutes. I am running a quad core, 6GB RAM, vista 64bit and the software is still a dog.

@Greg Hart : Am agree with you. FW-CS4 is the software buggiest of the world but still I love this one :).

Am also using Fireworks for over 4 years. Sometime FW crash without notification and you loss your valuable design.

The main issue of FW-CS4 is ‘Performance” and “Crashing”.

I putted alot of posts on Adobe Forums but FW Team still ignoring me and others.

No more hope was left but now I hope they will improve FW-CS5.

Cheers:
Junaid Atari

@Greg Hart & @Junaid Atari: you both are 101% right, altough FW CS4 came with very new cool stuff but it has some issues with it which are really very frustating… but what can we do. let us just keep hope for fixes in future releases....