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

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.