Adobe Photoshop has long been the tool of choice of the professional
designer across all disciplines. It's simply proven to be the most
comprehensive tool out there for image editing. Support for Web
designers has traditionally been quite strong, but the latest release
of Photoshop has cut back the Web feature set to a bare minimum.
Photoshop's Web-centric companion application, ImageReady, has bitten
the proverbial dust; it's been totally removed from the product
lineup. This leaves only the Slice tool, Animation palette and Save
for Web and Devices command within Photoshop itself to cater for Web
designers.


By contrast, Fireworks - formally made by Macromedia, now owned by
Adobe and part of the CS3 suites - has become the application
ImageReady wanted to be. Fireworks is an image editor a little like
Photoshop, but it has always catered primarily for Web designers. True
to its roots, the first proper release as part of the CS3 suite gives
us some revolutionary new tools in the Web design area.


The big one is something that's worth moving your entire workflow to
Fireworks for: multiple pages within a single file. This means that
you can prototype your entire site design within one file. For
example, your single file might contain the header, footer, menu and
basic column layouts of the site. Each page you create within the file
inherits these elements automatically. Need to change the header
image? Just change it once in the master page. Wonderful! That's going
to save hours when working on a big site with many common elements. It
also reduces the risk of mistakes when making changes to multiple page
mockups over time.


Integration with Photoshop is also much better than it was, and
Fireworks now has the ability to scale rounded rectangles
intelligently. You can also now prototype Flex applications from
within Fireworks, and output Flex-friendly MXML files. Sadly
Dreamweaver hasn't quite caught up yet, and still can't compile Flex
apps straight out of the box - you have to add components manually to
get it to do this. This is a major omission on Adobe's part, with the
impending threat of Microsoft's Silverlight very much on the horizon.


So what's Fireworks not so good at? Well, the interface still has that
rather nasty Macromedia feel, and it hasn't been overhauled to conform
to the slick new CS3 format sported by Photoshop, Illustrator and
Flash. This is a bit of a stumbling block if you did want to move,
since the interfaces are quite different, and it's a bit of a culture
shock at first. It's not a great photo-editing tool either; Photoshop
still wins hands down for that.


So should you move? ImageReady's demise and Fireworks' feature set
show that Fireworks is the way ahead for Web developers, and the
cursory Web tools remaining in Photoshop are the minimum you could get
away with really. If that's all you need, then great, but Fireworks is
where it's at, baby.

Tyler