You don’t need to open documents in Fireworks you can drag and drop Fireworks files from the Windows Explorer or from Internet to Adobe Fireworks and use the Toolbar area to create new tabs. Check the videos.

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Thoughts of 3 reknown web designers about their favorite tool: Adobe Fireworks. What they like and what they hate about it:

• Jon Hicks
• Merlin Mann
• Paul Boag
• Away Back

When Fireworks and Facebook meet the result is a fresh and active fan page for Adobe Fireworks.

Thanks Mikko for letting me know. But who is running the page?

See ya at Facebook »

Still looking for the default swatches in Adobe Fireworks?

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Jeff Rothe demonstrates in his article: Save time exporting web images using Fireworks that slicing in Fireworks can cut your time in half when Photoshop and Fireworks are compared.

With Fireworks coming with the Creative Suite packages you have no excuse you don’t start using Fireworks.

A comprehensive set of over 100 Fireworks cursor symbols for Windows in bitmap format. They are intended to web developers, tutorial writers or for prototyping. Read more..

A new tutorial site dedicated to Adobe Fireworks is created by Calandemo AKA Callan Demellweek. He has been freelance web design for about 1.5 years now in Australia.

Welcome to the Fireworks community. Check out his website.

Download Fireworks Zone’s wallpaper made by angelo sabal aka blue2x for Fireworks Zone, check his website at www.blue2x.com and his Fireworks tutorials at his blog www.blog.blue2x.com.

It’s an abstract colorfull wallpaper with the traditional yellow Fireworks with an explosion of creativity at the center surrounded by the virtual cyberspace. Only one flavour: 1024×768 px.

You can download Adobe AIR 1.5 Update for Fireworks CS4 from Fireworks Support Center

I would like to stress that unfortunately the Fireworks Support Center has no RSS Feed and thus making it difficult to stay tuned.

The update is available in English and Japanese only.

Source: Sarthak Singhal’s blog

Fireworks is a great application for prototyping banner ads. In our previous post, we looked at how Fireworks is a great tool for prototyping and designing banner ads using the Symbols and Frames/States features . See the previous post here.

Tom Buchok, co-founder of Bannerflow, shows us how to turn a PNG file into a SWF, and import it into Flash for banner ad development. Read more.

Those terms are more and more common in the Fireworks jargon since Fireworks is now the rapid prototyping specialist.

The starting point is the creation of the structure of a web page or a website: layout of the fundamental elements with navigation (with or without interactivity) with no colors, graphics, or fonts. After approval of the first wireframe a more detailed version is proposed and so on until the HTML layouts.

Creating a set of wireframes is also called a story board and each new wireframe an iteration.

Those techniques are very similar and are attempts to make the website building process more rational to avoid making endless changes and the programmers tweaking their code too often. Read More.

Useful links:

• Web Site Wireframe
• Website Wireframe
• Wireframing with Fireworks CS3

Going back in Fireworks history, it seems that Fireworks 1 was launched around April, 1998 and today we are a few months late but we can celebrate a decade of Fireworks.

You can add more details to the Fireworks version table http://www.fireworkszone.com/fireworks-10th-anniversary_118.html where you can view all the Fireworks versions from Fireworks 1 to Fireworks CS4.

Fireworks 10th Anniversary coincides with my birthday on 20th September (I am a bit older than 10)

On this occasion, Adobe, is offering 3 Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium for Macintosh only (Sorry for the Windows people).

Please contact me to receive one of these boxes and don’t forget to add your postal address.

More and more designers are now reflecting on Fireworks. After a first article in July from Digital_Web, a second one more recently Making Illustrator and Fireworks Fit it is now [Re]Encoded who tries to answer fundamental questions: what are Fireworks and Photoshp strenghts and weaknesses and at the end of the day which is best?

For their comparison they take into account 4 features:

• Quick Modifications
• Print Design
• Web Design
• Advanced Techniques

Read the whole article.

Stéphane Bergeron’s comment:
Here is a very nice post about Fireworks and Illustrator
from Mordy Golding’s blog who used to be Illustrator’s Program Manager before
Dave Macy the current one. He has a lot of positive things to say about
Fireworks which is a refreshing change coming from an “old” Adobean.
It’s also nice to see the focus removed from the Fireworks-Photoshop
comparisons. Having come to Fireworks from Illustrator myself which is
the first graphic app I’ve learned and used,and being a Photoshop
refugee, still not understanding how anyone can prefer it to any vector
app for layout and design tasks, it was a good read. Well worth reading anyway.

Read the whole article.

30 Tutorials That Will Teach You Fireworks is a collection of tuts with tol learn something new. I would like to mention that you will find a couple of Fireworks Zone’s tutorials. Read more.

With the new Drag and Drop feature in Firefox 3 you can drag images from webpages to Fireworks which is a great time saver. This is the first time Firefox has an impact on Fireworks. Read more.

Adobe TV was introduced beginning of April 2008, read press release. Adobe TV is designed to educate, inspire, and entertain the creative community, it is immediately available online from the Adobe Web site at http://tv.adobe.com , or as a network with multiple shows in the new Adobe® Media Player 1.0 software.

In Adobe TV you can learn from the pros by watching videos and following along. It’s not quite as structured and comprehensive as Lynda, but it’s free. This a perfect site to visit between projects and refresh your knowledge and your skills.

As a special feature you can embed the videos in 3 sizes in your website and a link page is provided.

Related videos:

• Exploring the Developer Center with Alan Musselman
• The Cooper case with Nick Myers
• Rapid Prototyping with Danielle Beaumont
• Disc Glolf with Alan Musselman

Fireworks CS4 Public Beta announced

Please Alan cut your beard!

Made of Win is a German blogging site offering 6 excellent Fireworks tutorials.

My favorite is how to use the new Blend Paths feature. Speaking of Blend Paths, read Aaron Beall’s tutorial for a good start.

Even though it is in German you should get no difficulty to understand. Read the tutorials.

Enjoy!

Digital Web Magazine posted an enlightening article where they gathered a team of 8 great designers, fans of both Photoshop and Fireworks, comparing and weighing pros and cons of Photoshop and Fireworks.

Each designer is giving his point of view and tips from their hand-on experience as designer, UI designer, etc. But the most striking is that Fireworks supporters are growing but at the end of day all depends how well you feel confortable with your app. Read More

Fireworks Zone is proud to announce the launching of forums to support Fireworks users.

Cast your posts in one of the 5 boards. Visit the Forum.