Fireworks CS[SUX]
A couple of days ago I was called out to submit a Posterous letter to the Adobe Fireworks team along with many more Fireworks enthusiasts. What was supposed to be a simple list of suggestions I had for the upcoming Creative Suite 6 turned into a fairly nasty page of to-dos and bug fixes. Yes, I went a little overboard writing about the piece of software that has my career by the balls in a tight, iron grip. After submitting, it unsurprisingly went unpublished with the rest of the FW community’s letters… So I figured I’d just post it here. ^_^
But really: if Fireworks CS6 ends up being the same exact thing as CS5 save for a couple of new HTML5/CSS3 export tools, I will undoubtedly just die. This is an important piece of software. It needs love, just like the rest of the creative suite. So much love.
So anywho… my rage shan’t go unnoticed:
Dear Adobe Fireworks Software Developer,
I’m aware that CS6 is likely to already be completed but I would like to share my thoughts on your software regardless. I’ve formed my entire career on Fireworks so you can imagine how my attachment to this piece of hardware is borderline emotional.
The most obvious suggestion for Fireworks CS6 would be to get up to 64-bit so we can better take advantage of the enormous amounts or RAM in computers today.
Secondly: get rid of all Flash components of the the application. By this I do not mean remove all Flash support in save/exporting, but rather to have all windows, toolboxes, and commands written in native OS X/Windows code (getting started screen, Paths window, etc).
Or, in combination of the first two suggestions, just completely rewrite the entire application. You’ve been building on top of it since it’s creation; it shows, i.e. Keyboard Shortcuts Window. I’m sure there are layers deep down in the code that haven’t been touched in a decade. Just start from scratch. Take a year off and unveil it with CS7 if you need to.
Next, more in the realm of feature suggestions, I am in need of a quick and easy way to copy and paste layer styles. Photoshop does this with ease. Fireworks’ version of styles is an unruly mess.
Lastly, some other miscellaneous features I would like and bugs I would LOVED to have fixed:
• Support documents over 6000x6000px
• Add different levels of antialiasing for vector shapes. CS3 had this down perfectly. CS4’s vector rendering engine drove it into the ground. I have a command/extension that applies the CS3 rendering engine to any shape you want. I’m pretty sure you guys sent that out to calm the outrage of the new, grittier, rougher CS4 rendering. Make that a feature.
• Stop fireworks from resizing my windows. Every time I restart the application, my Layers and Pages window are shrunk down to make room for… a bunch of empty space in the Align and Paths windows.
• Text-to-paths does not work. At all. When you convert text to paths, it turns the letters into malformed monstrosities, which I’m sure the new CS4 vector rendering engine is to blame for. Fix it.
• Ability to turn off Snap-to-pixel. When drawing with the vector paths pen, each point automatically snaps to every 1x1px wherever you click. Stop it. Let me turn that off please.
• Gradients are off center. If you place a radial gradient into any shape, you’ll notice that the center of the actual gradient is 0.5px to the right. This sounds stupid, but it really makes it hard to get an even gradient on small shapes/icons and it looks dumb.
• Replace all of the bitmap tools with the ones from photoshop. The current ones suck.
• The stroke tool is completely unusable; I usually draw my strokes from scratch. The strokes are either too rough (when stroke edge is set to 0) or too soft (when you up edge level to 1). Most, if not all of the presets are ugly. The only real use for strokes is when I need a clean aliased 1px line. :|
• Replace all factory textures and patters. They’re all late-90’s ugly and can be upgraded to textures much more usable today, such as Apple’s crosshatch background pattern or even a simple wood texture.
• Inset/Expand Paths usually never works in the same manner that Text-To-Paths is a complete crapfest haha. Just… fix it.
I can assure you all of this negative criticism comes with love. Just do your best to fix this wonderful application and don’t let anyone come in and shut it down.
Kind Regards,
Tim Shundo, Fireworks Enthusiast/ Your #1 Fan. @timshundo
New Blogz
So I’m like MAN I don’t want to switch up the format of my blog and make my followers have to leave cuz I’m not gonna be posting photos anymorWAIT. I can just fucking make a NEW BLOG!? ALSO ON TUMBLR? AT THE SAME TIME AS MY OTHER!?
So there you have it. My previous blog is now my “photoblog” and now this one, now my main blog, will be whatever the hell I want y’all. FALLOWZ!
Tim
