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Many years ago, when Adobe bought Macromedia, they acquired a tool called Fireworks[1]. This was a combined bitmap and vector editor that was incredibly well-op

Many years ago, when Adobe bought Macromedia, they acquired a tool called Fireworks[1]. This was a combined bitmap and vector editor that was incredibly well-optimised for user-interface and web design, at a time when most designers were paying exorbitant license fees to do such work painfully and slowly in Photoshop and Illustrator. Fireworks was cheap, powerful, and hugely ahead of its time. Many of the features and flows people love in Figma and Sketch were pioneered years earlier in Fireworks. After the acquisition, Adobe starved Fireworks of resources and marketing. They broke things, left major bugs and performance regressions unfixed, and eventually discontinued it altogether. I'd argue this wasn't simply negligence, but a calculated decision to kill an innovative product because it threatened the profits of their cash cows. As much as I hope otherwise, I believe the acquisition of Figma will go the same way. Once it's under the Adobe umbrella, the simple mathematics of profits from Photoshop and Illustrator vs. those from Figma will result in the latter being starved, stripped of functionality, and eventually left broken. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Fireworks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Fireworks

pembrook 4y ago
They literally did the same thing with dreamweaver as well. And now dreamweaver is a fast growing business in the form of Webflow. It’s the same story over and over again. Adobe acquires and then stifles innovation. 10 years later we realize what we were missing out on when a challenger eventually gets big enough—-until Adobe kills that company too. I’d bet a nice chunk of money that Webflow is next.
- rchaud 4y ago
  I don't think so. Webflow is all marketing and PR IMO. The issue with Webflow is that GUI-based web design that exports static HTML files doesn't fit with how most large websites are coded and deployed. It would be one thing if Webflow CMS and Ecommerce was gaining market share vs Squarespace and Wix, but I don't know if that's really happening. When I go on Twitter, I mostly see PR-type posts about Webflow. Lots of "Webflow experts" but few real companies that are willing to build large sites with it.
  - pembrook 4y ago
    They actually are gaining market share dramatically among high traffic (big company) marketing sites: https://www.sitebuilderreport.com/state-of-website-builders/ https://www.sitebuilderreport.com/state-of-website-builders/ Once static site generators + headless CMS's became all the rage among enterprise IT types, that opened the door to Webflow...since Webflow is basically a GUI-based static site generator + headless CMS. If you ask the engineering team, they'll build the marketing site into a complicated monstrosity on Gatsby + Contentful, and then never allow you to touch it again. You'll need to go through them to make any changes--and they'll be busy with real product work. If you build on Webflow, you're basically doing the same thing, but putting ownership of the marketing site squarely inside the marketing org (who likely has people who's time is less expensive able to do what you need in Webflow...and faster). There's limitations for sure (eg. multi-lingual sites, nested directory URL structure, etc), but within a few years I'm guessing those will be solved and the adoption will be even more dramatic. Although Webflow seems to be stupidly focusing on the whole "No code" Twitter circle-jerk with Logic/memberships, so they may get disrupted by Framer in the meantime however.
    - rchaud 4y ago
      > If you build on Webflow, you're basically doing the same thing, but putting ownership of the marketing site squarely inside the marketing org (who likely has people who's time is less expensive able to do what you need in Webflow...and faster). Fair enough. I still don't think Webflow CMS is going to make much of a dent in this market (even though I think their GUI is much better than Wix/Squarespace). The charts in the site builder report link, even being 2 years old, suggest they're well behind even obscure platforms like Google Sites.
      - magicink81 4y ago
        I would expect change in market share to be faster for design tools than CMS systems / web builders, as the barrier to adoption is lower for design tools, however, change does happen when innovation addresses under-served market needs and delivers greater value against those needs. Framer, Webflow, Jotform and others seem to be on a path to doing just that. Here's a chart that shows Figma's rise against competitors: https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*gdeNbC57BJKydbYQjNdqOg.png https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*gdeNbC57BJKydbYQjNdqOg.pn...
rcarmo 4y ago
There's a recent comment of mine someplace about how much I miss the _genius_ of Fireworks as a combined pixel/vector art tool that saved everything to standard PNG files - which anyone could read since the additional data was inserted using PNG tags. That and it being very fast and effective for Web design (miles ahead of Photoshop at the time).
deleted 4y ago
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papito 4y ago
Ah, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Geocities. I miss the days when the Internet was full of magic and wonders, and not dumpster fires.
- mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
  I miss those days too. Built so many sites in Dreamweaver + Fireworks. But it's probably not the internet that has changed, but you. It's not magical anymore because we're no longer kids and because it has become normal to be online. After having to deal with 56k modems for years, every moment of being continuously online felt special.
- cutler 4y ago
  Pre-WordPress.
GraphenePants 4y ago
Please stop breaking the site rules by incorrecting assuming malice when incompetence is sufficient. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- darkwater 4y ago
  I guess you are being ironic, but if not, that applies to individuals commenting here, not companies acquiring other businesses.
- larrik 4y ago
  That rule certainly doesn't apply to Adobe.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Gareth321 4y ago
  Nothing in the rules say anything about malice or incompetence. The most charitable interpretation I could find for your assertion is this line: > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. Of course, the subject of this is a user's comments, not a corporation. I suggest you read the rules a little more thoroughly before accusing others of breaking them.
seanalltogether 4y ago
I still keep a copy of CS6 installed just for Fireworks. It was the first design tool that made sense to me as a programmer that wanted to think of everything in terms of pixels and object groups. I should probably move on at this point but it still does what I need it to do.
- jeremycarter 4y ago
  I reluctantly moved on to Affinity Designer. I still miss Fireworks but I knew I had to get off it cold turkey.
zx2c4 4y ago
I too really loved Fireworks (and Dreamweaver) back in the Macromedia days. As a kid then, it was really very intuitive to do all sorts of odd creative projects easily. Riding on nostalgia fumes, I went searching for screenshots and in the process amusingly found: https://askubuntu.com/a/244128 https://askubuntu.com/a/244128 - a Linux user still running Fireworks 8 in WINE. I'm almost tempted to try the same...
- rcarmo 4y ago
  I just did, since I have WINE installed to run music software. It runs _perfectly_, although with early 2000s era UX conventions (i.e., very small fonts, some pixelated). Edits seem very fast, although it is hard to say on my hardware (Ryzen 7). As a curio, it's a fun experiment, but being a bit less nostalgic and more realistic now, I'd quicker reach for GIMP or Krita on Linux (on the Mac, I use Pixelmator Pro and Affinity Designer for the semi-advanced editing I need)... Although I do love this thing. FYI, the download of version 8 was available to use as a 30-day trial, which seems legal enough today, if only for experimentation, and I actually have a license of MX someplace from my G4 Mac days.
- bradstewart 4y ago
  Those two pieces of software were undoubtedly the thing that got me into websites, which led to building computers, which led to my current career. Incredible stuff.
- speeder 4y ago
  I actually do that myself. I also use Fireworks 8 on windows when possible. I am yet to find a software that actually replaces it.
vldx 4y ago
I was heavy user of Fireworks back in the day. Looking back — it had enormous influence over where I’m now today. I still can’t get over what Adobe did to it. It’s like Microsoft or some other behemoth buying JetBrains and then slowly killing it in favor of its own IDEs.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  Yeah, there's still nothing as good as fireworks at what it did. Figma is better in some ways with autolayout, etc. But fireworks also had excellent bitmap editing support.
- briandon 4y ago
  Microsoft bought GitHub years ago and announced the "sunsetting" of the Atom editor (a GitHub-company project) and its official ecosystem a few months ago. The archiving of Atom and all related projects will occur on Dec. 15th, 2022: https://github.blog/2022-06-08-sunsetting-atom/ https://github.blog/2022-06-08-sunsetting-atom/.
eurasiantiger 4y ago
Adobe’s direct competitor is Adobe XD, which launched with practically no features and was slowly developed only to dwindle to death as a rarely used cloud service, while everyone does the important work in Figma. The parent comment is spot-on. Antitrust legislation needs to be invoked to prevent this acquisition from happening.
- scarface74 4y ago
  It amazes me that people posting on a YC controlled board whose entire purpose for existing is to fund startups long enough to get an exit - statistically most likely through an acquisition by a bigger company - wants to stop acquisitions. The funding environment for startups would be a lot worse if investors thought that the only way they could recoup their investments is through exits. Look how few of YC companies actually go public. Even companies that do go public are often just surviving long enough to hopefully get acquired. The founders at Figma chose to be acquired. It’s their product and their company.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    > wants to stop acquisitions. Who said that? The point is that anticompetitive acquisitions, like Adobe acquiring a direct competitor, hurt everyone but the acquirer, and should be tightly controlled. Nobody would care if Figma were getting acquired by GitLab or Salesforce or Atlassian or whatever. The fact that it's a direct competitor known for destroying acquisitions is the problem.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      Why would Gitlab want Figma? Could it afford it? I am sure the owners of Figma thought this was the best available option. It’s their company - not yours or the governments. If they want to sell their property it’s theirs to sell. Would Gitlab make it a better product if it was sold to them?
      - sofixa 4y ago
alberth 4y ago
This is an online collaboration / network effect acquisition. Not a tech acquisition. (This is like Microsoft acquiring Github due to GitHub network effect) While I too loved Fireworks and Dreamweaver, neither one had the network effect that Figma does (granted, SaaS software in the late 90s / early 00s was rare). Even if Fireworks were to have flourished while at Adobe, it's not entirely clear they would have successful made both the pivot to web AND also gained the network effect that Figma has created.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  > This is an online collaboration / network effect acquisition. Not a tech acquisition. One could also make the argument that it's an acqui-hire. If one wanted to build a real Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, Premiere, etc. for the web, you'd want the Figma team. Nobody else understands how to build desktop-like experiences using the latest web technologies (Wasm, etc.) better.
  - denkquer 4y ago
    photopea.com
    - CharlesW 4y ago
      I have nothing but praise for Photopea. Having used it in the past, it's great for things that I might otherwise use macOS Preview (or similar utilities) for. However, Photopea is at least a couple of orders of magnitude simpler than the Adobe apps I mentioned. It'd be interesting to compare to Photoshop 1.0 (1987), though!
oooofigma 4y ago
Making 9 sliced graphics for the web is obsolete though. That said Flash also supported a bunch of innovation for its time, and it too was obsoleted. Maybe 9 slice graphic were already dead at Fireworks’ peak. Figma is officially way more overrated than this stuff ever was. Does anyone know a person who’s like, bonafide smart, using Figma? I feel like everyone I know who does “Figma” day to day is doing negative ROI shit. It’s like anti-R&D. It’s the ultimate bullshit job for non engineers.
- ethanbond 4y ago
  Well if your definition of bonafide smart is that they’re an engineer, then there are pretty few. If you think design and visual communication has any value whatsoever, then yeah, lots of people are using it, some of whom are very smart. That’s why they’re worth $20B after all.
  - DoctorOW 4y ago
    I like the community here overall but there are far too many discussions tainted by the implicit assumption that if (royal) you see yourself as valuable then others value is synonymous with their similarity to you.
- pembrook 4y ago
  One of the top users of Figma by time-spent-in-app in its early days was the founder of a little tool called Notion. So apparently spending your days in Figma can result in negative ROI shit like designing a billion dollar product. But hey, I used to have the same gut feeling…that anyone who does something different to what I do all day is worthless. Then I got older and learned my model of the world, with me at the center of it, was naive and incorrect.
GordonS 4y ago
I used Fireworks for years for web design stuff - it was simple to use, but fully featured, a real joy to use. As soon as Adbobe bought Macromedia, I knew they would shitcan it because of Photoshop and Illustrator. And I knew other nice Macromedia tools, like Dreamweaver, would have a similar fate. Such a shame, and buying a competitor just to kill it feels so wrong :( I'm not totally sure if Figma will suffer a similar fate, but I do think it's going to get progressively more expensive, harder to use, buggier, and generally be more user-hostile.
- markdown 4y ago
  > I used Fireworks for years for web design stuff I still use it as my primary web/ui design tool and in fact am stuck on MacOS Mojave because I'd have to say goodbye to it forever if I upgraded.
  - erik_landerholm 4y ago
    Can you use a virtual machine?
  - bezier-curve 4y ago
    I still use Fireworks CS6 for one-off mockups. I don't specialize in design myself, but I think that's exactly why I like using it - its UI is intuitive and simple. I've tried newer/maintained vector editors like Inkscape and Krita, and still feel like there's a void left by Fireworks for casual users like myself.
  - shedside 4y ago
    I'm in exactly the same boat. It's such a shame that AFAIK nothing can import .fw.png files and keep them editable; I'll need to manually export everything to .psd before I eventually have to upgrade my OS.
  - ssharp 4y ago
    I thought I was one of the last Fireworks users and I gave it up a few years ago in favor of Sketch! Once I learn a tool well enough to suit my needs, I really hate giving it up so it was a difficult transition. Probably why I never bothered abandoning Sketch in favor of Figma.
tambourine_man 4y ago
Don't forget Freehand, which was, in many ways, superior to Illustrator.
- aceazzameen 4y ago
  Was looking for this comment. I loved Freehand. It was so much better than Illustrator. Don't get me wrong, Illustrator today has come a long way. But I can only imagine what Freehand in 2022 would be like.
- Eric_WVGG 4y ago
  I used to always check out new releases of Illustrator to see if they had caught up to CorelDraw circa 1999… behind those cheesy vector and free-font CDs was a vastly superior vector editor. (to be fair, they seem to have mostly caught up around 2010-ish?)
thomassmith65 4y ago
In case people are too young to remember, Macromedia was well on its way to matching Adobe's application suite – except Macromedia apps had far better UX, better performance, and better integration with the web. There's a good case that Adobe would no longer exist today had Adobe not acquired Macromedia.
- MiddleEndian 4y ago
  I still use Adobe Animate (formerly Macromedia Flash), for simple vector drawings. For example, you can just draw a circle, draw a line through it, delete part of the circle that is bisected on the line, then click and drag the line or the remaining curve to curve those two segments. It's so much easier than using the pen tool or having to deal with vectors in Illustrator.
  - JoeyJoJoJr 4y ago
    Same here. I’ve never found a vector editing tool to be as intuitive as Animate/Flash.
- coldtea 4y ago
  >except Macromedia apps had far better UX, better performance, and better integration with the web Lest we only remember the roses smelling side, Macromedia also made the pile of crap called Flash. And Both Fireworks and Dreamweaver had their fair share of bugs under Macromedia too.
  - shiftpgdn 4y ago
    Flash was an incredible accessible animation engine. There are dozens of “webtoons” that got their start as flash animations.
    - coldtea 4y ago
      It was accessible, but also insecure, and buggy. And aside from animations, it helped build the "landing page" nightmare - huge (for the download speeds of the time) pages, loading tons of assets, to do nothing. Or the even worse "flash-only website" which just showed some text and images, and had nightmarish navigation, slow download times, didn't use regular html widgets, and you couldn't copy and paste or take a bookmark of your position in it...
jmacd 4y ago
I remember how Fireworks *felt* to use. Just seeing that name written again gave me warm fuzzy feelings. Fireworks came about at a time when web design was almost entirely something you did in HTML. The workflow to go from bitmap to web was really bad, so most of us just did things natively. Fireworks was the first tool that allowed you to draw, but maintain the constraints (and portability) of HTML and CSS as it came in to prominence. The closest thing I have had to that feeling again was when a friend of mine did some design for me and shared it in Figma. What I thought were bitmaps were vectors!! I had so much fun bringing that in to my site (which I ended up doing in Webflow, because apparently I haven't kept up with the times enough to hand code reasonably quickly). I've used the latest and greatest Adobe products, they definitively do not have this feeling. There is really no delight to be found. I know they are incredibly powerful and near and dear to many people, but for the young and restless they are boring.
- klondike_klive 4y ago
  I was part of the first wave of animators who found Flash and mucked around in it - I made a cartoon early on that went viral before that was a thing. An exe file as an attachment to an email, that went round the world. Crazy days.
conductr 4y ago
The only hope is that since Figma is subscription revenue, they will immediately feel the pain of neglecting the product. I’d imagine it’s a mature enough, well known enough product that you could say it’s already stolen as much share as it would from adobe’s cash cows. Potentially it’s the place users get started nowadays and adobe could leverage it by making it easier for those users to explore adobe’s other products.
- MiddleEndian 4y ago
  >The only hope is that since Figma is subscription revenue, they will immediately feel the pain of neglecting the product. I honestly haven't observed this to be the case with subscription software. They will continue making cash because people want to continue to use it. Meanwhile, if it were individual sales, they would actually have to maintain and improve it to get people to buy new versions.
dimmke 4y ago
Yeah but we will still have Sketch, which rules. Nobody uses Illustrator and Photoshop to do web design anymore.
cutler 4y ago
Adobe killed Fireworks hoping their competitor ImageReady would prevail.
LeftCorner 4y ago
I still run a 22 year old copy Fireworks 4 because of Adobe's shenanigans. Just this morning I had to crop and resize a 1 MB image for display on a website and was able to do that in Fireworks in about 2 minutes resulting in 15k PNG and was on to my next task.
- coldtea 4y ago
  Well, you can do that with almost any very lightweight app, including apps costing like $10 and having hardware acceleration and everything, like Acorn and Pixelmator (examples on the Mac side) and also "be on to your next task". You can even fully automate it (well, at least the resize, you'll still need to pick where to crop) with both.
  - roddds 4y ago
    Or you could use the myriad of free and/or open source software including but not limited to GIMP, ImageMagick, and photopea.com.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  A basic image viewer included in your OS can probably do that - and a lot quicker than two minutes! How does Fireworks make it so slow to open, resize, and close?
  - LeftCorner 4y ago
    Most of the two minutes was setting up Windows to select Fireworks as the editor. I have Windows 10. There is a program called Paint 3D. I opened it now and do not see guides or the option to turn on guides. I do not have an export option where I can preview different formats with different color palettes. If I had more time I could probably list other features Fireworks has that I have become accustomed to. Oh and Fireworks is consistent. I can trust when I have a task I can open it and it will have expected behavior and features. The way modern software removes and add features and add and hides options on every update makes using the software a task in of itself, before doing the business at hand. I'd rather make my images and be on about my day.
chickenchicken 4y ago
I loved fireworks. I had the first version on my laptop and it was slow but amazing.
lnxg33k1 4y ago
But when these big corps buy and potentially kill products shrinking competition, where the hell is antitrust to be found? Like are the guys there sleeping well? Would they like a massage?
- collegeburner 4y ago
  it hasn't yet passed that review. which is standard for deals like this, announce first then the regulators have their say.
  - lnxg33k1 4y ago
    So there’s hope :fingers crossed:
sophacles 4y ago
Hey, at least they kept flash alive...
nneonneo 4y ago
Ah, Fireworks brings back good memories. I used Fireworks way back in high school to design websites - you could throw together a basic multi-page website with a clickable/hoverable image navbar in literally minutes, no code required. And it looked good too, at least by the standards of the early 2000s. Later, I did the vast majority of the visuals I used throughout my PhD in Fireworks CS6, long after it had been abandoned by Adobe. It was fast, faster than Photoshop or Illustrator is today. The shape libraries meant that doing diagrams and illustrations was a breeze - these days I do most of that in Keynote/Powerpoint, with much poorer bitmap editing support. Photoshop and Illustrator are simply too big and slow for quick-and-dirty editing tasks. The thing that ultimately killed Fireworks for me was that it crashed more frequently every time I updated macOS, to the point where it simply would no longer launch. For a couple of years I maintained a set of binary patches to Fireworks CS6 to work around startup crashes and such, but that ultimately got to be too time-consuming to keep up with. I don't think I've ever been as productive in any other image editing software. Photopea gets surprisingly close for me - despite being a Photoshop clone, it's both faster (just a web app!) and has a few of the nice features I miss from Fireworks.
josefresco 4y ago
We still use Fireworks! I open it every day, and it remains a decent vector and simple image editor. Back in the day we used to create our web designs in Fireworks and then (before we knew better) "slice" them to HTML and export using Fireworks. Even after we transitioned to building by hand, we still used Fireworks for things like creating mouseover menus. Bad news for Figma.
- bradstewart 4y ago
  Oh man, I totally forgot about the slice-into-HTML stuff. Back before everyone decided table-based layouts were "harmful".
  - josefresco 4y ago
    We used HTML tables for several years before fully transitioning to DIV based layouts. With CSS you could/can make tables flexible and that's all we needed for most responsive layouts.
coldtea 4y ago
>I'd argue this wasn't simply negligence, but a calculated decision to kill an innovative product because it threatened the profits of their cash cows. Well, that product was also theirs at that point, so it wouldn't be threatening anything (profits of its sales would go to them anyway). If you people people would stop buying Photoshop and Illustrator, then no, Fireworks was meant for other use case entirely (web mostly), and it had 1/10 the capabilities of Photoshop and Illustrator pertaining to their own domains (yes, many use just 10% of a program, but many must-have features included in that 10% differ from person to person, so Fireworks having that 10% wouldn't be enough).
drchopchop 4y ago
These tools aren't interchangeable. Photoshop is for editing images. Illustrator is for editing vector graphics. Figma is a multiplayer layout tool, which can be used for web, print, or anything else. The main use cases for enterprise are a) it's web-accessible, and b) the realtime collaboration/revision/commenting tools. The smart thing would be to just sunset Adobe XD and replace it with Adobe Figma.
- oangemangut 4y ago
  Pretty sure that's the long term plan.
aldous 4y ago
I remember Fireworks very well and completely agree it was exceptionally well optimised for UI. As well as the ability to easily edit both bitmaps and vectors, the combination of frames and layer sets nested within the frames allowed for super rapid iterations on layouts. The export features were super optimal too at the time. Rather irrational of me, but I took the slow death of it rather personally and never forgave Adobe.
neovive 4y ago
I have such great memories of Fireworks prior to the acquisition by Adobe. It was my go to tool for 90% of all web graphics: simple to use, no need to fuss with layers for selections, vector + bitmap in one app, easy exports, and everything editable within a PNG file. Such a wonderful tool! I truly hope Figma doesn't suffer the same fate. Hopefully the $20B price tag, justifies resources.
johnfn 4y ago
How does this analogy make sense though? Fireworks was, to Adobe, some third-rate app that Adobe had to acquire because they had acquired Flash, the thing they really cared about. Adobe certainly maintained Flash - anyone remember ActionScript 3? In this Figma acquisition, Figma is the main prize. They're not just going to leave Figma to languish, no more than they left Flash to languish. Eventually Flash did die, yes, but that was more Apple crushing it than a direct decision of Adobe.
- JoeyJoJoJr 4y ago
  Adobe ran Flash into the ground. Flash was developing at such a rapid pace until it was acquired, and then quickly stagnated. Adobe too way too long to get Adobe Air performant and the tooling was abysmal. If Flash was in capable hands, it would have become a major player in the game development space, which is where most of its strengths were.
  - klondike_klive 4y ago
    And yet I still get jobs working in Flash, there's still no comparable program for frame-by-frame vector animation. A package that you can draw into but also rig puppets in. I'm rooting for Grease Pencil to catch up but really it's nowhere near in terms of fast usability. That's not so say they didn't run it into the ground - I still remember the nightmare of CS5.
    - JoeyJoJoJr 4y ago
      Indeed. I still build my game assets in Animate CC, export them with the Export Texture Atlas feature, and then have a custom built runtime play the animations in my game. It’s quite simple to build such a runtime for immediate mode rendering engines such HTML canvas, Monogame, Kha.
  - johnfn 4y ago
    > If Flash was in capable hands, it would have become a major player in the game development space, which is where most of its strengths were. I don't understand what you mean here. Flash WAS a major player in the game development space. Flash games were dominant on the web for something like a decade, and a large part of that was post-Adobe acquisition. Yes, they missed the boat on mobile, but that was more a function of Jobs putting his foot down on anything vaguely Flash-related.
mrandish 4y ago
I wouldn't be so sure anything will be similar to Adobe->Macromedia. That was 17 years ago and Adobe is a very different company today operating in a different competitive environment with a different business model. Also, Adobe's competitor to Figma isn't PS or AI, it's a newer tool called Adobe xD. Adobe has sunk a lot of effort into getting xD "right" but so far failed to make it competitive. This massive acquisition is Adobe admitting that the xD effort failed and giving up. In recent years, Adobe's approach to mega-sized acquisitions has been to put the newly acquired company's management in charge of the relevant business unit, not the other way around. The users who should be worried by the news are those who love Adobe xD vs Figma (I assume there must be some). If the post-acquisition integration goes well, I'd estimate the chances at better than 50% that in a couple years former Figma management end up running Adobe's creative professional segment entirely (ie PS, AI, etc). (note: none of this means you personally will prefer whatever the impact of that may be in any particular product.)
imwillofficial 4y ago
I used fireworks back in the day! Loved macromedia as a young fledgling tech person
thiscatis 4y ago
I can’t believe Fireworks is already considered “once upon a time software”. It’s what got me into webdesign, together with Dreamweaver.
Spartan112 4y ago
creativenolo 4y ago
How quickly did Adobe fold the Macromedia products into their own product eco-system? I ask because Adobe have been sitting on their Substance aqusition without making part of the Creative Cloud Suite. Hopefully they may leave it alone.

pembrook 4y ago

They literally did the same thing with dreamweaver as well. And now dreamweaver is a fast growing business in the form of Webflow. It’s the same story over and over again. Adobe acquires and then stifles innovation. 10 years later we realize what we were missing out on when a challenger eventually gets big enough—-until Adobe kills that company too. I’d bet a nice chunk of money that Webflow is next.

rchaud 4y ago
I don't think so. Webflow is all marketing and PR IMO. The issue with Webflow is that GUI-based web design that exports static HTML files doesn't fit with how most large websites are coded and deployed. It would be one thing if Webflow CMS and Ecommerce was gaining market share vs Squarespace and Wix, but I don't know if that's really happening. When I go on Twitter, I mostly see PR-type posts about Webflow. Lots of "Webflow experts" but few real companies that are willing to build large sites with it.
- pembrook 4y ago
  They actually are gaining market share dramatically among high traffic (big company) marketing sites: https://www.sitebuilderreport.com/state-of-website-builders/ https://www.sitebuilderreport.com/state-of-website-builders/ Once static site generators + headless CMS's became all the rage among enterprise IT types, that opened the door to Webflow...since Webflow is basically a GUI-based static site generator + headless CMS. If you ask the engineering team, they'll build the marketing site into a complicated monstrosity on Gatsby + Contentful, and then never allow you to touch it again. You'll need to go through them to make any changes--and they'll be busy with real product work. If you build on Webflow, you're basically doing the same thing, but putting ownership of the marketing site squarely inside the marketing org (who likely has people who's time is less expensive able to do what you need in Webflow...and faster). There's limitations for sure (eg. multi-lingual sites, nested directory URL structure, etc), but within a few years I'm guessing those will be solved and the adoption will be even more dramatic. Although Webflow seems to be stupidly focusing on the whole "No code" Twitter circle-jerk with Logic/memberships, so they may get disrupted by Framer in the meantime however.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    > If you build on Webflow, you're basically doing the same thing, but putting ownership of the marketing site squarely inside the marketing org (who likely has people who's time is less expensive able to do what you need in Webflow...and faster). Fair enough. I still don't think Webflow CMS is going to make much of a dent in this market (even though I think their GUI is much better than Wix/Squarespace). The charts in the site builder report link, even being 2 years old, suggest they're well behind even obscure platforms like Google Sites.
    - magicink81 4y ago
      I would expect change in market share to be faster for design tools than CMS systems / web builders, as the barrier to adoption is lower for design tools, however, change does happen when innovation addresses under-served market needs and delivers greater value against those needs. Framer, Webflow, Jotform and others seem to be on a path to doing just that. Here's a chart that shows Figma's rise against competitors: https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*gdeNbC57BJKydbYQjNdqOg.png https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*gdeNbC57BJKydbYQjNdqOg.pn...

rcarmo 4y ago

There's a recent comment of mine someplace about how much I miss the _genius_ of Fireworks as a combined pixel/vector art tool that saved everything to standard PNG files - which anyone could read since the additional data was inserted using PNG tags. That and it being very fast and effective for Web design (miles ahead of Photoshop at the time).

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papito 4y ago

Ah, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Geocities. I miss the days when the Internet was full of magic and wonders, and not dumpster fires.

mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
I miss those days too. Built so many sites in Dreamweaver + Fireworks. But it's probably not the internet that has changed, but you. It's not magical anymore because we're no longer kids and because it has become normal to be online. After having to deal with 56k modems for years, every moment of being continuously online felt special.
cutler 4y ago
Pre-WordPress.

GraphenePants 4y ago

Please stop breaking the site rules by incorrecting assuming malice when incompetence is sufficient. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

darkwater 4y ago
I guess you are being ironic, but if not, that applies to individuals commenting here, not companies acquiring other businesses.
larrik 4y ago
That rule certainly doesn't apply to Adobe.
deleted 4y ago
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Gareth321 4y ago
Nothing in the rules say anything about malice or incompetence. The most charitable interpretation I could find for your assertion is this line: > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. Of course, the subject of this is a user's comments, not a corporation. I suggest you read the rules a little more thoroughly before accusing others of breaking them.

seanalltogether 4y ago

I still keep a copy of CS6 installed just for Fireworks. It was the first design tool that made sense to me as a programmer that wanted to think of everything in terms of pixels and object groups. I should probably move on at this point but it still does what I need it to do.

jeremycarter 4y ago
I reluctantly moved on to Affinity Designer. I still miss Fireworks but I knew I had to get off it cold turkey.

zx2c4 4y ago

I too really loved Fireworks (and Dreamweaver) back in the Macromedia days. As a kid then, it was really very intuitive to do all sorts of odd creative projects easily. Riding on nostalgia fumes, I went searching for screenshots and in the process amusingly found: https://askubuntu.com/a/244128 https://askubuntu.com/a/244128 - a Linux user still running Fireworks 8 in WINE. I'm almost tempted to try the same...

rcarmo 4y ago
I just did, since I have WINE installed to run music software. It runs _perfectly_, although with early 2000s era UX conventions (i.e., very small fonts, some pixelated). Edits seem very fast, although it is hard to say on my hardware (Ryzen 7). As a curio, it's a fun experiment, but being a bit less nostalgic and more realistic now, I'd quicker reach for GIMP or Krita on Linux (on the Mac, I use Pixelmator Pro and Affinity Designer for the semi-advanced editing I need)... Although I do love this thing. FYI, the download of version 8 was available to use as a 30-day trial, which seems legal enough today, if only for experimentation, and I actually have a license of MX someplace from my G4 Mac days.
bradstewart 4y ago
Those two pieces of software were undoubtedly the thing that got me into websites, which led to building computers, which led to my current career. Incredible stuff.
speeder 4y ago
I actually do that myself. I also use Fireworks 8 on windows when possible. I am yet to find a software that actually replaces it.

vldx 4y ago

I was heavy user of Fireworks back in the day. Looking back — it had enormous influence over where I’m now today. I still can’t get over what Adobe did to it. It’s like Microsoft or some other behemoth buying JetBrains and then slowly killing it in favor of its own IDEs.

nicoburns 4y ago
Yeah, there's still nothing as good as fireworks at what it did. Figma is better in some ways with autolayout, etc. But fireworks also had excellent bitmap editing support.
briandon 4y ago
Microsoft bought GitHub years ago and announced the "sunsetting" of the Atom editor (a GitHub-company project) and its official ecosystem a few months ago. The archiving of Atom and all related projects will occur on Dec. 15th, 2022: https://github.blog/2022-06-08-sunsetting-atom/ https://github.blog/2022-06-08-sunsetting-atom/.

eurasiantiger 4y ago

Adobe’s direct competitor is Adobe XD, which launched with practically no features and was slowly developed only to dwindle to death as a rarely used cloud service, while everyone does the important work in Figma. The parent comment is spot-on. Antitrust legislation needs to be invoked to prevent this acquisition from happening.

scarface74 4y ago
It amazes me that people posting on a YC controlled board whose entire purpose for existing is to fund startups long enough to get an exit - statistically most likely through an acquisition by a bigger company - wants to stop acquisitions. The funding environment for startups would be a lot worse if investors thought that the only way they could recoup their investments is through exits. Look how few of YC companies actually go public. Even companies that do go public are often just surviving long enough to hopefully get acquired. The founders at Figma chose to be acquired. It’s their product and their company.
- sofixa 4y ago
  > wants to stop acquisitions. Who said that? The point is that anticompetitive acquisitions, like Adobe acquiring a direct competitor, hurt everyone but the acquirer, and should be tightly controlled. Nobody would care if Figma were getting acquired by GitLab or Salesforce or Atlassian or whatever. The fact that it's a direct competitor known for destroying acquisitions is the problem.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Why would Gitlab want Figma? Could it afford it? I am sure the owners of Figma thought this was the best available option. It’s their company - not yours or the governments. If they want to sell their property it’s theirs to sell. Would Gitlab make it a better product if it was sold to them?
    - sofixa 4y ago

alberth 4y ago

This is an online collaboration / network effect acquisition. Not a tech acquisition. (This is like Microsoft acquiring Github due to GitHub network effect) While I too loved Fireworks and Dreamweaver, neither one had the network effect that Figma does (granted, SaaS software in the late 90s / early 00s was rare). Even if Fireworks were to have flourished while at Adobe, it's not entirely clear they would have successful made both the pivot to web AND also gained the network effect that Figma has created.

CharlesW 4y ago
> This is an online collaboration / network effect acquisition. Not a tech acquisition. One could also make the argument that it's an acqui-hire. If one wanted to build a real Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, Premiere, etc. for the web, you'd want the Figma team. Nobody else understands how to build desktop-like experiences using the latest web technologies (Wasm, etc.) better.
- denkquer 4y ago
  photopea.com
  - CharlesW 4y ago
    I have nothing but praise for Photopea. Having used it in the past, it's great for things that I might otherwise use macOS Preview (or similar utilities) for. However, Photopea is at least a couple of orders of magnitude simpler than the Adobe apps I mentioned. It'd be interesting to compare to Photoshop 1.0 (1987), though!

oooofigma 4y ago

Making 9 sliced graphics for the web is obsolete though. That said Flash also supported a bunch of innovation for its time, and it too was obsoleted. Maybe 9 slice graphic were already dead at Fireworks’ peak. Figma is officially way more overrated than this stuff ever was. Does anyone know a person who’s like, bonafide smart, using Figma? I feel like everyone I know who does “Figma” day to day is doing negative ROI shit. It’s like anti-R&D. It’s the ultimate bullshit job for non engineers.

ethanbond 4y ago
Well if your definition of bonafide smart is that they’re an engineer, then there are pretty few. If you think design and visual communication has any value whatsoever, then yeah, lots of people are using it, some of whom are very smart. That’s why they’re worth $20B after all.
- DoctorOW 4y ago
  I like the community here overall but there are far too many discussions tainted by the implicit assumption that if (royal) you see yourself as valuable then others value is synonymous with their similarity to you.
pembrook 4y ago
One of the top users of Figma by time-spent-in-app in its early days was the founder of a little tool called Notion. So apparently spending your days in Figma can result in negative ROI shit like designing a billion dollar product. But hey, I used to have the same gut feeling…that anyone who does something different to what I do all day is worthless. Then I got older and learned my model of the world, with me at the center of it, was naive and incorrect.

GordonS 4y ago

I used Fireworks for years for web design stuff - it was simple to use, but fully featured, a real joy to use. As soon as Adbobe bought Macromedia, I knew they would shitcan it because of Photoshop and Illustrator. And I knew other nice Macromedia tools, like Dreamweaver, would have a similar fate. Such a shame, and buying a competitor just to kill it feels so wrong :( I'm not totally sure if Figma will suffer a similar fate, but I do think it's going to get progressively more expensive, harder to use, buggier, and generally be more user-hostile.

markdown 4y ago
> I used Fireworks for years for web design stuff I still use it as my primary web/ui design tool and in fact am stuck on MacOS Mojave because I'd have to say goodbye to it forever if I upgraded.
- erik_landerholm 4y ago
  Can you use a virtual machine?
- bezier-curve 4y ago
  I still use Fireworks CS6 for one-off mockups. I don't specialize in design myself, but I think that's exactly why I like using it - its UI is intuitive and simple. I've tried newer/maintained vector editors like Inkscape and Krita, and still feel like there's a void left by Fireworks for casual users like myself.
- shedside 4y ago
  I'm in exactly the same boat. It's such a shame that AFAIK nothing can import .fw.png files and keep them editable; I'll need to manually export everything to .psd before I eventually have to upgrade my OS.
- ssharp 4y ago
  I thought I was one of the last Fireworks users and I gave it up a few years ago in favor of Sketch! Once I learn a tool well enough to suit my needs, I really hate giving it up so it was a difficult transition. Probably why I never bothered abandoning Sketch in favor of Figma.

tambourine_man 4y ago

Don't forget Freehand, which was, in many ways, superior to Illustrator.

aceazzameen 4y ago
Was looking for this comment. I loved Freehand. It was so much better than Illustrator. Don't get me wrong, Illustrator today has come a long way. But I can only imagine what Freehand in 2022 would be like.
Eric_WVGG 4y ago
I used to always check out new releases of Illustrator to see if they had caught up to CorelDraw circa 1999… behind those cheesy vector and free-font CDs was a vastly superior vector editor. (to be fair, they seem to have mostly caught up around 2010-ish?)

thomassmith65 4y ago

In case people are too young to remember, Macromedia was well on its way to matching Adobe's application suite – except Macromedia apps had far better UX, better performance, and better integration with the web. There's a good case that Adobe would no longer exist today had Adobe not acquired Macromedia.

MiddleEndian 4y ago
I still use Adobe Animate (formerly Macromedia Flash), for simple vector drawings. For example, you can just draw a circle, draw a line through it, delete part of the circle that is bisected on the line, then click and drag the line or the remaining curve to curve those two segments. It's so much easier than using the pen tool or having to deal with vectors in Illustrator.
- JoeyJoJoJr 4y ago
  Same here. I’ve never found a vector editing tool to be as intuitive as Animate/Flash.
coldtea 4y ago
>except Macromedia apps had far better UX, better performance, and better integration with the web Lest we only remember the roses smelling side, Macromedia also made the pile of crap called Flash. And Both Fireworks and Dreamweaver had their fair share of bugs under Macromedia too.
- shiftpgdn 4y ago
  Flash was an incredible accessible animation engine. There are dozens of “webtoons” that got their start as flash animations.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    It was accessible, but also insecure, and buggy. And aside from animations, it helped build the "landing page" nightmare - huge (for the download speeds of the time) pages, loading tons of assets, to do nothing. Or the even worse "flash-only website" which just showed some text and images, and had nightmarish navigation, slow download times, didn't use regular html widgets, and you couldn't copy and paste or take a bookmark of your position in it...

jmacd 4y ago

I remember how Fireworks *felt* to use. Just seeing that name written again gave me warm fuzzy feelings. Fireworks came about at a time when web design was almost entirely something you did in HTML. The workflow to go from bitmap to web was really bad, so most of us just did things natively. Fireworks was the first tool that allowed you to draw, but maintain the constraints (and portability) of HTML and CSS as it came in to prominence. The closest thing I have had to that feeling again was when a friend of mine did some design for me and shared it in Figma. What I thought were bitmaps were vectors!! I had so much fun bringing that in to my site (which I ended up doing in Webflow, because apparently I haven't kept up with the times enough to hand code reasonably quickly). I've used the latest and greatest Adobe products, they definitively do not have this feeling. There is really no delight to be found. I know they are incredibly powerful and near and dear to many people, but for the young and restless they are boring.

klondike_klive 4y ago
I was part of the first wave of animators who found Flash and mucked around in it - I made a cartoon early on that went viral before that was a thing. An exe file as an attachment to an email, that went round the world. Crazy days.

conductr 4y ago

The only hope is that since Figma is subscription revenue, they will immediately feel the pain of neglecting the product. I’d imagine it’s a mature enough, well known enough product that you could say it’s already stolen as much share as it would from adobe’s cash cows. Potentially it’s the place users get started nowadays and adobe could leverage it by making it easier for those users to explore adobe’s other products.

MiddleEndian 4y ago
>The only hope is that since Figma is subscription revenue, they will immediately feel the pain of neglecting the product. I honestly haven't observed this to be the case with subscription software. They will continue making cash because people want to continue to use it. Meanwhile, if it were individual sales, they would actually have to maintain and improve it to get people to buy new versions.

dimmke 4y ago

Yeah but we will still have Sketch, which rules. Nobody uses Illustrator and Photoshop to do web design anymore.

cutler 4y ago

Adobe killed Fireworks hoping their competitor ImageReady would prevail.

LeftCorner 4y ago

I still run a 22 year old copy Fireworks 4 because of Adobe's shenanigans. Just this morning I had to crop and resize a 1 MB image for display on a website and was able to do that in Fireworks in about 2 minutes resulting in 15k PNG and was on to my next task.

coldtea 4y ago
Well, you can do that with almost any very lightweight app, including apps costing like $10 and having hardware acceleration and everything, like Acorn and Pixelmator (examples on the Mac side) and also "be on to your next task". You can even fully automate it (well, at least the resize, you'll still need to pick where to crop) with both.
- roddds 4y ago
  Or you could use the myriad of free and/or open source software including but not limited to GIMP, ImageMagick, and photopea.com.
chrisseaton 4y ago
A basic image viewer included in your OS can probably do that - and a lot quicker than two minutes! How does Fireworks make it so slow to open, resize, and close?
- LeftCorner 4y ago
  Most of the two minutes was setting up Windows to select Fireworks as the editor. I have Windows 10. There is a program called Paint 3D. I opened it now and do not see guides or the option to turn on guides. I do not have an export option where I can preview different formats with different color palettes. If I had more time I could probably list other features Fireworks has that I have become accustomed to. Oh and Fireworks is consistent. I can trust when I have a task I can open it and it will have expected behavior and features. The way modern software removes and add features and add and hides options on every update makes using the software a task in of itself, before doing the business at hand. I'd rather make my images and be on about my day.

chickenchicken 4y ago

I loved fireworks. I had the first version on my laptop and it was slow but amazing.

lnxg33k1 4y ago

But when these big corps buy and potentially kill products shrinking competition, where the hell is antitrust to be found? Like are the guys there sleeping well? Would they like a massage?

collegeburner 4y ago
it hasn't yet passed that review. which is standard for deals like this, announce first then the regulators have their say.
- lnxg33k1 4y ago
  So there’s hope :fingers crossed:

sophacles 4y ago

Hey, at least they kept flash alive...

nneonneo 4y ago

Ah, Fireworks brings back good memories. I used Fireworks way back in high school to design websites - you could throw together a basic multi-page website with a clickable/hoverable image navbar in literally minutes, no code required. And it looked good too, at least by the standards of the early 2000s. Later, I did the vast majority of the visuals I used throughout my PhD in Fireworks CS6, long after it had been abandoned by Adobe. It was fast, faster than Photoshop or Illustrator is today. The shape libraries meant that doing diagrams and illustrations was a breeze - these days I do most of that in Keynote/Powerpoint, with much poorer bitmap editing support. Photoshop and Illustrator are simply too big and slow for quick-and-dirty editing tasks. The thing that ultimately killed Fireworks for me was that it crashed more frequently every time I updated macOS, to the point where it simply would no longer launch. For a couple of years I maintained a set of binary patches to Fireworks CS6 to work around startup crashes and such, but that ultimately got to be too time-consuming to keep up with. I don't think I've ever been as productive in any other image editing software. Photopea gets surprisingly close for me - despite being a Photoshop clone, it's both faster (just a web app!) and has a few of the nice features I miss from Fireworks.

josefresco 4y ago

We still use Fireworks! I open it every day, and it remains a decent vector and simple image editor. Back in the day we used to create our web designs in Fireworks and then (before we knew better) "slice" them to HTML and export using Fireworks. Even after we transitioned to building by hand, we still used Fireworks for things like creating mouseover menus. Bad news for Figma.

bradstewart 4y ago
Oh man, I totally forgot about the slice-into-HTML stuff. Back before everyone decided table-based layouts were "harmful".
- josefresco 4y ago
  We used HTML tables for several years before fully transitioning to DIV based layouts. With CSS you could/can make tables flexible and that's all we needed for most responsive layouts.

coldtea 4y ago

>I'd argue this wasn't simply negligence, but a calculated decision to kill an innovative product because it threatened the profits of their cash cows. Well, that product was also theirs at that point, so it wouldn't be threatening anything (profits of its sales would go to them anyway). If you people people would stop buying Photoshop and Illustrator, then no, Fireworks was meant for other use case entirely (web mostly), and it had 1/10 the capabilities of Photoshop and Illustrator pertaining to their own domains (yes, many use just 10% of a program, but many must-have features included in that 10% differ from person to person, so Fireworks having that 10% wouldn't be enough).

drchopchop 4y ago

These tools aren't interchangeable. Photoshop is for editing images. Illustrator is for editing vector graphics. Figma is a multiplayer layout tool, which can be used for web, print, or anything else. The main use cases for enterprise are a) it's web-accessible, and b) the realtime collaboration/revision/commenting tools. The smart thing would be to just sunset Adobe XD and replace it with Adobe Figma.

oangemangut 4y ago
Pretty sure that's the long term plan.

aldous 4y ago

I remember Fireworks very well and completely agree it was exceptionally well optimised for UI. As well as the ability to easily edit both bitmaps and vectors, the combination of frames and layer sets nested within the frames allowed for super rapid iterations on layouts. The export features were super optimal too at the time. Rather irrational of me, but I took the slow death of it rather personally and never forgave Adobe.

neovive 4y ago

I have such great memories of Fireworks prior to the acquisition by Adobe. It was my go to tool for 90% of all web graphics: simple to use, no need to fuss with layers for selections, vector + bitmap in one app, easy exports, and everything editable within a PNG file. Such a wonderful tool! I truly hope Figma doesn't suffer the same fate. Hopefully the $20B price tag, justifies resources.

johnfn 4y ago

How does this analogy make sense though? Fireworks was, to Adobe, some third-rate app that Adobe had to acquire because they had acquired Flash, the thing they really cared about. Adobe certainly maintained Flash - anyone remember ActionScript 3? In this Figma acquisition, Figma is the main prize. They're not just going to leave Figma to languish, no more than they left Flash to languish. Eventually Flash did die, yes, but that was more Apple crushing it than a direct decision of Adobe.

JoeyJoJoJr 4y ago
Adobe ran Flash into the ground. Flash was developing at such a rapid pace until it was acquired, and then quickly stagnated. Adobe too way too long to get Adobe Air performant and the tooling was abysmal. If Flash was in capable hands, it would have become a major player in the game development space, which is where most of its strengths were.
- klondike_klive 4y ago
  And yet I still get jobs working in Flash, there's still no comparable program for frame-by-frame vector animation. A package that you can draw into but also rig puppets in. I'm rooting for Grease Pencil to catch up but really it's nowhere near in terms of fast usability. That's not so say they didn't run it into the ground - I still remember the nightmare of CS5.
  - JoeyJoJoJr 4y ago
    Indeed. I still build my game assets in Animate CC, export them with the Export Texture Atlas feature, and then have a custom built runtime play the animations in my game. It’s quite simple to build such a runtime for immediate mode rendering engines such HTML canvas, Monogame, Kha.
- johnfn 4y ago
  > If Flash was in capable hands, it would have become a major player in the game development space, which is where most of its strengths were. I don't understand what you mean here. Flash WAS a major player in the game development space. Flash games were dominant on the web for something like a decade, and a large part of that was post-Adobe acquisition. Yes, they missed the boat on mobile, but that was more a function of Jobs putting his foot down on anything vaguely Flash-related.

mrandish 4y ago

I wouldn't be so sure anything will be similar to Adobe->Macromedia. That was 17 years ago and Adobe is a very different company today operating in a different competitive environment with a different business model. Also, Adobe's competitor to Figma isn't PS or AI, it's a newer tool called Adobe xD. Adobe has sunk a lot of effort into getting xD "right" but so far failed to make it competitive. This massive acquisition is Adobe admitting that the xD effort failed and giving up. In recent years, Adobe's approach to mega-sized acquisitions has been to put the newly acquired company's management in charge of the relevant business unit, not the other way around. The users who should be worried by the news are those who love Adobe xD vs Figma (I assume there must be some). If the post-acquisition integration goes well, I'd estimate the chances at better than 50% that in a couple years former Figma management end up running Adobe's creative professional segment entirely (ie PS, AI, etc). (note: none of this means you personally will prefer whatever the impact of that may be in any particular product.)

imwillofficial 4y ago

I used fireworks back in the day! Loved macromedia as a young fledgling tech person

thiscatis 4y ago

I can’t believe Fireworks is already considered “once upon a time software”. It’s what got me into webdesign, together with Dreamweaver.

Spartan112 4y ago

creativenolo 4y ago

How quickly did Adobe fold the Macromedia products into their own product eco-system? I ask because Adobe have been sitting on their Substance aqusition without making part of the Creative Cloud Suite. Hopefully they may leave it alone.