[IxDA Discuss] Fireworks CS3

[Robert Barlow-Busch]

Despite today's excellent point that our most important tool is our brains,
I'm wading in with a few quick remarks about the newest Fireworks release.
I've used it for almost two weeks now and am loving it.

Here's why:

- For folks on Macs, it's (finally) Intel native. A huge performance
improvement on my MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz.

- They've introduced the concept of "Pages". Previously, if you wanted to
capture more than one screen or screen states in a single file, you had to
either use layers (an awkward choice) or frames (a better choice). With the
introduction of pages, we now have the correct metaphor.

- It's easy to create simple walkthroughs of your designs and preview them
in a browser: simply draw a hotspot/slice over a region on the page, then
indicate which other page in the document should be the destination
hyperlink. Export all your pages to HTML and voila!

For those of you who export designs into other tools such as Acrobat or
PowerPoint for the purpose of demonstrating a series of screen flows, I
highly recommend you look into Fireworks CS3. It pretty much eliminates the
need for this step, especially if you're working on a website or web app.

Lots of other improvements in this release, but those are my favorites so
far. Would love to hear from others who have played with features such as
the Common Library...

-- 
Robert Barlow-Busch
Terapath Inc.
bbb at terapath.net