Software Review:
Macromedia Fireworks
Part 4
By David Fiedler
How Good is Fireworks?
Despite all the control you have over images and text in Fireworks -- and there's quite a bit of it -- you can't change text into 3D or create beveled Web buttons in a single, "press me" button click, though you can accomplish these tasks if you know your way around the program. You also can't scan images in directly, the way you can with almost any other graphics creation program, or create animations almost painlessly the way
Adobe's new ImageReady product
(also in beta) can.
What Fireworks can do is let you relegate many larger, more expensive graphics tools to the back burner altogether, while keeping your legacy image files intact and useful. It can let you convert a great deal of your work to the much more Web-friendly PNG format, export to GIF or JPG in the most efficient way possible, and generate JavaScript code automatically for mouseovers and HTML for image maps. And it might just let you create and modify your work faster than you thought possible.
This article first appeared in May, 1998.
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