[IxDA Discuss] Illustrator vs Fireworks

[Dave Cronin]

Another plus worth mentioning about Fireworks for UI rendering:

FRAMES.

Frames  can be used to store different screen states. You can set it up
so that a Layer is the same on every Frame (and changing it one place
changes it everywhere), or so that it is different for every Frame.

This means that when you export 200 screen states, you don't have to go
through and manually turn each layer on and off.

Also:

SYMBOLS.

You can define a group of objects as a symbol and then changing it once
changes it everywhere. Even across files.

It is true that Fireworks does not provide nearly the level of
typographic control that Illustrator does, nor the level of pixel
control that Photoshop does, but in cases where you need that level of
control, it's possible to import that stuff as symbols.