7 ms·

The Future of Adobe Fireworks

108 points by dinosaurs 13y ago

Zikes 13y ago
> Over the last couple of years, there has been an increasing amount of overlap in the functionality between Fireworks and both existing and new programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Edge Reflow. Because we'd all much rather have to work in and pay for all three of those applications than to have the one tool that does it right?
- aaronblohowiak 13y ago
  The monthly creative suite subscription is a pretty good deal and lets you download/use all the cs apps.
  - shawnc 13y ago
    That's not the point. The point is having to use all three of those apps to achieve what the wonderful Fireworks did all on its own.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - grey-area 13y ago
    It's certainly a very good deal for Adobe. As a customer I don't feel it's a good deal for me at all as it forces me to pay for upgrades and products many of which I don't want, and divorces the money I pay from any specific product, so that I can no longer choose to reward products which address my needs, and ignore those which don't. I have no particular attachment to Fireworks for example, but Adobe streamlining their product offering and making it into a subscription suite only subsidises things like Adobe Bridge which simply shouldn't exist, at the expense of apps and features which customers actually want. It's around $80 a month in the UK for Adobe CC, and of course they will increase this gradually over time as more customers are locked in. Given the CS updates of the last few years, I have trouble finding reasons to upgrade from CS5, which works fine for me currently, and have no interest in paying them money every month to change the UI around arbitrarily and add more misfeatures like 'Save for Microsoft Office' in CS Illustrator, or reinforce the lack of working interchange between InDesign CS versions (in order to force upgrades). As a long-term customer it feels like Adobe updates are now more focussed on forcing participation in the upgrade treadmill than adding features or improving performance, and this move to subscription pricing with a 'creative cloud' just reinforces this trend - Adobe is now all about customer lock-in and forcing customers to pay in-perpetuity, rather than producing great products. The last great product they produced was Lightroom, and I've seen nothing impressive in the CS since that (for my use). One telling result of this move is that they have now withdrawn the 'perpetual license' that they started selling last year - that lasted 1 year it seems. Perhaps this is inevitable in the mature stage of a corporation, but I'm sad to see what was once a scrappy underdog fighting the likes of quark become focussed on keeping wall street rather than their customers happy.
- mathnode 13y ago
  Actually, all the replacements are free: http://html.adobe.com/edge/ http://html.adobe.com/edge/ And are much less poisonous than what comes out of Fireworks for dev teams. "Turn this picture/HTML export into code please."
  - johanWuyckens 13y ago
    Then you have been working with designers who were not using FW properly. I never used it to export HTML unless for a quick demonstration mock-ups.
normanv 13y ago
WebCode is a vector drawing app that instantly generates CSS+HTML, JavaScript+Canvas or SVG code. http://www.webcodeapp.com/ http://www.webcodeapp.com/ If you have a Mac, WebCode is a great alternative to Fireworks.
- Osmium 13y ago
  Interestingly, they also make an app called PaintCode which outputs Objective-C code: http://www.paintcodeapp.com http://www.paintcodeapp.com I'm sure they used to be part of the same app; I'm not sure when that changed or what the logic was behind it.
  - PixelCut 13y ago
    We just launched WebCode about a month ago (been selling http://www.paintcodeapp.com/ http://www.paintcodeapp.com/ for more than a year). The two apps obviously share a lot of internals. We decided to make WebCode a separate app because it has an entirely different target audience.
    - terhechte 13y ago
      Avid PaintCode user here, just learned about WebCode. Interestingly, more than once I wished I had the ability to export from PaintCode to something web with CSS or Canvas. Great to know there's now an app for that, but wouldn't it make sense to kinda also have it as additional functionality (maybe in-app purchase) for Paintcode?
      - PixelCut 13y ago
        Technically, this is entirely possible. We have developer builds which support both kinds of code generators in a single app. We're still considering this.
        Osmium 13y ago
        From my own personal perspective it might be a good idea, because I think it really messes with your branding -- I saw the WebCode page and knew it felt familiar and thought it was "that cool app that outputs Obj-C code" but looked in the feature list and couldn't find it, got very confused, and then did a google search... It doesn't help that, as far as I can see, PixelCut doesn't have its own homepage, and there's no link from the one app page to the other app page so I didn't even know they were made by the same developer without looking at the copyright notice at the bottom! Just my opinion anyway. Great app either way :)
Osmium 13y ago
My first copy of Fireworks I bought when it was still owned by Macromedia and it was wonderful; so powerful yet easy to use. It was my impression that Adobe never really "got" it, or knew how it should exist in their ecosystem as a sort-of competitor to their other products. It was sad watching it flounder, but I wonder what Adobe could've done differently.
- AdamTReineke 13y ago
  Macromedia Fireworks MX 2004? Loved it, was my go-to image editor for a VERY long time.
  - kevinwmerritt 13y ago
    I got started designing websites using FW MX 2004 before I graduated to writing CSS first. The ability to mockup designs and then use the slice export feature was great fun. I love Fireworks.
  - bredren 13y ago
    Same here. I particularly liked its ability to do frame by frame animated gif editing easily. RIP.
- seanalltogether 13y ago
  I feel like Adobe never really got macromedia tools at all. They knew they wanted to own the content creation market, but they never really understood the developer side of the content creation game. Fireworks is the last Adobe tool I use these days and I'm disappointed they can never understand why someone like me would continue to use it.
  - richforrester 13y ago
    Adobe's own online presence is a prime example of how they don't understand the web. Same goes for the decision to drop CS and continue with only their cloud-based services: they should've done that about 10 years ago. I can't remember for how long I've been saying I'd be willing to pay monthly for their programs if there only was such a subscription. And I'm not trying to brag there. I'm meaning to say that it's ridiculous how slow they have moved. I've never met a person who didn't agree with the above. I wonder how many students would've shelled out 20 bucks a month instead of downloading Adobe's software illegally if they'd done this sooner.
kunai 13y ago
I'm a bit confused that they kept Dreamweaver but killed off Fireworks. No web designer I know even uses Dreamweaver anymore, but plenty of people still use Fireworks. Odd decision by Adobe here.
- veritas20 13y ago
  I'm sure that more cuts are on the way. Having a breadth of products works well for software that's distributed in a non-SaaS model. Now, that they have embraced a subscription model, expect narrowing the product suite.
  - kunai 13y ago
    It's sad that so many software companies think it's a good idea to sell a "service" and not a tangible copy of bits and bytes. It's less hassle to buy CS6 once and be done with it and upgrade when you want to, rather than keep renewing subscriptions and be faced with product changes you may not necessarily like or want.
    - as_if 13y ago
      That's the trick. You get the people to pay for all eternity ;)
    - taude 13y ago
      I had CS5 Production Suite for Windows. I had to change my editing rig to OS X but at the time CS 6 had already come out and Adobe only was doing the OS-switching on the current version of the release of their software. So, they got me, and I had to do the creative cloud for $70/month (I didn't want to commit for the year). I'm now waiting for the Final Cut Pro X/Motion to go on sale again, and wil be paying a one time fee of $250-$350 for Apple's editing solution. (I'm hoping I can get by on FCP, since the price is definitely appealing). So, it might be "less hassle" or not...but it's definitely better for predictable revenues selling a monthly/yearly subscription, especially with the lack of tangible competition for some of the products.
- harrisonweber 13y ago
neovive 13y ago
At least FW will still be around and somewhat supported for quite a while. FW is pretty much feature-complete and can continue functioning well into the future.
georgemcbay 13y ago
I'm now conditioned to read "The Future of Product X" headlines as "Product X Has No Future". Sadly, the pattern holds here.
zeruch 13y ago
I grew to like Fireworks but can see how it could be effectively rolled into PS or Illustrator in some kind of FW compat mode if they wanted to. Which is to say they won't do that, and they'll otherwise likely screw the maximum number of users implicitly. That is unfortunate, but sadly seems like par for the course these days.
msutherl 13y ago
It's a great time to try Sketch: http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch/ http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch/. Does most of what Fireworks does much better. Unfortunately it's Mac only though.
- efields 13y ago
  I've been a fan of Fw for many years and now primarily use Sketch. It doesn't have the raster capabilities of Fireworks (Pixelmator's there when I need to work w/ bitmaps), but it has the same concept of Stylized Shapes and Shape Groups instead of Layers. Lately I've also enjoyed its "Copy CSS Attributes" feature for building linear gradients or shadows visually, then getting code which I can quickly use in browser.
- chestnut-tree 13y ago
  It would be great to see Sketch available for the PC. In the meantime, for of those on Windows, I would recommend trying Xara Photo and Graphic Designer. http://www.xara.com/uk/products/designer/ http://www.xara.com/uk/products/designer/ They have a free trial, but they are actually giving away an older version of the software for free until 20th May 2013 (in the hope that users will upgrade, no doubt) http://www.xara.com/us/specialoffers/designer/ http://www.xara.com/us/specialoffers/designer/ Xara is more of an alternative to Illustrator but it includes some basic bitmap manipulation tools. I have used Xara for many years and, in my opinion, it has a much better interface than Illustrator and is much more responsive in terms of screen redraw and speed. It's not completely equivalent to Illustrator in terms of features, but I would recommend downloading the trial (or the free version) and trying it out to see if it's suitable.
mildweed 13y ago
Does anybody have opinions on using Edge Reflow?
- harrisonweber 13y ago
  It is interesting, but certainly not finished software.
harrisonweber 13y ago
So, who's going to start the petition to make this open source?
- martey 13y ago
  Why would Adobe make Fireworks open source when they plan to continue selling and updating the last version? "While we are not planning further feature development for Fireworks, we will continue to sell Fireworks CS6 as well as make it available as part of the Creative Cloud. We will provide security updates as necessary and may provide bug fixes. We plan to update Fireworks to support the next major releases of both Mac OS X and Windows."
  - harrisonweber 13y ago
    No, I wasn't saying it would actually work ;)
- danboarder 13y ago
  There is a petition ( http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/adobe-com-release-adobe-fireworks-to-open-source http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/adobe-com-release-adob... ) and I posted it here on HN earlier, with some discussion going on there as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5666530 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5666530 One thing that came up in the discussion was that Adobe wouldn't open source due to proprietary internal content. However I replied this may or may not be true - Adobe has open-sourced several large projects. Flex (http://www.adobe.com/products/flex.html http://www.adobe.com/products/flex.html), for example is a big software product that Adobe switched to open source in 2007. From an article back then: "Ward outlined the transition as having the following steps: Today - Creation of Mailing List for Discussion Summer 2007 - Public Bug Database and Daily Builds Second Half 2007 - Flex 3 Released December 2007 - Read Only SVN Access, Patches Welcome 2008 - Committers with Write Access, Creation of Possible Subprojects " see: http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/04/flex-open-source http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/04/flex-open-source and: http://readwrite.com/2007/04/26/adobe_takes_fle http://readwrite.com/2007/04/26/adobe_takes_fle
Semaphor 13y ago
Does anyone know of an alternative that works as well with PNGs as Fireworks does? And runs under Windows.
- pornel 13y ago
  Alternatives to Fireworks' PNG export (compression): http://pngquant.org http://pngquant.org or http://tinypng.org http://tinypng.org
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
webwielder 13y ago
I can't recommend Antetype enough as not so much a Fireworks replacement but rather a much better and different tool that makes screen design much more efficient and easy: http://antetype.com/ http://antetype.com/
runarb 13y ago
"Error establishing a database connection"... Looks like hn can overload even adobe.com. Or at list there blog.
camus 13y ago
Sad for Fireworks that was a very good tool for WebDesign. I might be switching to Corel Draw as I dont want to have anything to do anymore with Adobe.
brown9-2 13y ago
I wonder what the thought process was behind allowing comments on a blog posting like this.
- lessnonymous 13y ago
  That's an interesting question. While we're kind of taking the conversation off topic, let me speculate. Imagine, if you will, that you have a popular product that you wish to EOL. And you know that people will not be happy. In fact, there'll be people who are downright angry and feel somehow betrayed. But you're going to do it. These people want to vent their frustration. These days, they can take to Twitter, blogs and any number of sites like HN and Reddit. But what if, as you told them you were discontinuing the product, you also gave them space to scream blue murder? And they would be screaming directly at your company, without even opening a new tab in their browser. Now you've corralled at least some of the vitriol on your own platform. Now you can turn off the comments in a week or a month and all that venom disappears like it was never there. Whether this is Adobe's intention doesn't matter. It's an interesting idea none the less.
  - prawn 13y ago
    If it wasn't intentional by them, you've certainly explained the benefit of it.
atechnerd 13y ago
I was suspicious that something was up with Fireworks after purchasing the web bundle for CS6 and noticing that Fireworks didn't adopt the new dark minimalist design that Photoshop and Illustrator had. I use Fireworks for all of my preliminary UI design work because it has the precision necessary to get across certain crucial design elements. Unfortunately, this is not possible with the low-fidelity wireframe alternatives and not intuitive in Adobe's other products. Yes, many of Adobe's products have overlap, but prototyping is a key part of the design workflow and deserving of a dedicated platform.
rhapsodyv 13y ago
Sadly... now that I was considering buy a licence...
ricardobeat 13y ago
The alternatives: Sketch - http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch Acorn - http://www.flyingmeat.com/acorn/ http://www.flyingmeat.com/acorn/ AnteType - http://antetype.com/ http://antetype.com/ PixelMator - www.pixelmator.com Unfortunately, none of them offers the blend of vector + raster tools that made Fireworks such a pleasure for web/UI design. Most importantly, they are mac-only and there is no interoperability - they can't read from Fireworks PNGs, and there is no suitable format to export between any of them.
- kmfrk 13y ago
  I keep seeing a billion alternatives suggested, but as a non-professional - and with the poor demonstrations of what they can on the websites - it's really hard to determine which does what, and which is better. Are there any good side-by-side comparisons anywhere, because there are so many options out there (at least for Mac) that I I feel that the daunting array of options is actually going to deter people like me from getting one of those programs.
gfodor 13y ago
It's weird they are killing this product because the existence of products like Sketch make it clear that there is a demand and a gap in the market for a good vector/raster tool for web design.
- lessnonymous 13y ago
  The existence (and ever increasing popularity) of Sketch can't be unnoticed at Adobe HQ. Therefore: 1. They're going to buy Sketch¹ 2. They're about to release a new product that replaces Fireworks 3. They're going to have some version of Photoshop and/or Illustrator capable of the same things. My guess? They're going to buy Sketch. If #2 was the case, it would have been demoed at Max. If #3 was the case, they'd have demoed at least some of those features at Max. ____ 1. When I say 'Sketch', I mean it-or-something-very-similar
mratzloff 13y ago
I can't get that upset about it. Fireworks still works and will for many years into the future. I have Fireworks CS3, and I don't really feel compelled to even upgrade to CS6.
girvo 13y ago
RIP Fireworks: I'll miss you. I started at 13, with the school's copy of Photoshop 7, building silly brushes by creating crazy polygons with 3ds Max and altering them (funnily enough, they're still online! http://girvo.deviantart.com/ http://girvo.deviantart.com/). I then began designing websites, using Photoshop, and slicing up the image with ImageReady (great for making GIFs too). But I always thought there must be a nicer way. Fireworks was that nicer way. I bought myself (with my pay saved up for months!) a copy of Macromedia's Fireworks, and lo and behold, it's perfect. The mix of raster and vector (although I had no idea what that meant technically, I appreciated it), the excellent layout tools, the brilliant UI... it was perfect. And now? Now it's dead. Thankfully, I no longer do too much graphic design, and most mockups I create are done in HTML/CSS these days. But I will miss it. Suppose it's all the more reason to learn the GIMP properly!
DigitalSea 13y ago
I knew this day was coming and yet I am still shocked. Fireworks is and always will be the best tool for wire-framing and web design, hands down. They've decided not to continue development of Fireworks and yet keep Dreamweaver? Dreamweaver is what I used for a period in my life when I was learning web development and you soon discover once you learn enough that it's horrible. I knew when Fireworks CS6 came out and Fireworks was neglected in the features and bug fixes department that it was only a matter of time. Adobe is somewhat dead to me now. I'll continue to use Fireworks until it stops working completely and once it does might consider running a VM with a version of Windows that supports it. It's time for the open source community to step up to the plate and create an open sourced version of Fireworks, heck it would be amazing if Adobe open sourced Fireworks so us die-hard users who see its potential and power continue to make it better and keep it alive for many more years to come. This wouldn't be such a bad thing if Adobe had another product like Fireworks, but they don't. Illustrator sucks for web design, Photoshop is too slow and bulky for agile web design or prototyping and the range of new applications Adobe has been bringing out don't really impress me in the slightest. The only way I can see Adobe from recovering from this is implementing some kind of way to load Photoshop in a "web mode" that gave you a similar interface as Fireworks but even then what about the features that make Fireworks so great? Pages, Master Pages, Styles, ability to click and drag elements around the canvas, Search and replace colours and fonts... This is a very bad move. Those who say it's not a big deal have obviously never used Fireworks nor used it long enough to truly appreciate just how great of a tool it is. This one particular line in the post really grinds my gears, “We understand that Fireworks has one of the most passionate communities on the web” — obviously they don't understand at all, if they understood they'd see there is a following for Fireworks. Judging by the comments on the post (and they keep on coming) everyone agrees this is a bad move, I didn't see one comment that agreed this was the right thing to do. This is an attempt to move users onto newer web tools which in my opinion don't come anywhere close to the simplicity and power of Fireworks and most likely never will. Fireworks was Adobe's only decent UX design tool and now I hope someone else see's any opportunity here to woo a very large number of Fireworks users who will be more than willing to pay for a decent and viable alternative to a very loved tool with a cult-like following. It seems like Sketch from Bohemian Coding is the only decent Fireworks alternative that's out there and it's Mac only. You could use Gimp but we all know Gimp is far from a professional alternative to anything. This is a sad day for me and a lot of other people.
elviejo 13y ago
Are there good free/open source replacements for Fireworks?
elviejo 13y ago
Are there good free/open source replacements for Fireworks?
Kiro 13y ago
Why is Fireworks so good for web design? What does it have that Photoshop doesn't?
Fletch137 13y ago
Try to get them to open-source it. It's a long shot, but worth a go, it might just save what we love about fireworks and put it in the hands of people who use it: http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/adobe-com-release-adobe-fireworks-to-open-source http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/adobe-com-release-adob...
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
daledavies 13y ago
What I don't understand is that Adobe must believe web designers aren't using Fireworks, it is something I've used since the Macromedia days so maybe I've missed out on something. If not Fireworks, what are all the web designers and developers using? Edit: To clarify I do kind of see where things are going. Fireworks has no built in support for exporting SVG or web fonts and I have not exported a background image to use on a website as a rounded corner or drop shadow in quite some time since CSS 3 has become more widely adopted. However for making reasonably accurate mock ups I've so far found no better tool than Fireworks.
Kekeli 13y ago
Well

108 points by dinosaurs 13y ago

Zikes 13y ago

> Over the last couple of years, there has been an increasing amount of overlap in the functionality between Fireworks and both existing and new programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Edge Reflow. Because we'd all much rather have to work in and pay for all three of those applications than to have the one tool that does it right?

aaronblohowiak 13y ago
The monthly creative suite subscription is a pretty good deal and lets you download/use all the cs apps.
- shawnc 13y ago
  That's not the point. The point is having to use all three of those apps to achieve what the wonderful Fireworks did all on its own.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- grey-area 13y ago
  It's certainly a very good deal for Adobe. As a customer I don't feel it's a good deal for me at all as it forces me to pay for upgrades and products many of which I don't want, and divorces the money I pay from any specific product, so that I can no longer choose to reward products which address my needs, and ignore those which don't. I have no particular attachment to Fireworks for example, but Adobe streamlining their product offering and making it into a subscription suite only subsidises things like Adobe Bridge which simply shouldn't exist, at the expense of apps and features which customers actually want. It's around $80 a month in the UK for Adobe CC, and of course they will increase this gradually over time as more customers are locked in. Given the CS updates of the last few years, I have trouble finding reasons to upgrade from CS5, which works fine for me currently, and have no interest in paying them money every month to change the UI around arbitrarily and add more misfeatures like 'Save for Microsoft Office' in CS Illustrator, or reinforce the lack of working interchange between InDesign CS versions (in order to force upgrades). As a long-term customer it feels like Adobe updates are now more focussed on forcing participation in the upgrade treadmill than adding features or improving performance, and this move to subscription pricing with a 'creative cloud' just reinforces this trend - Adobe is now all about customer lock-in and forcing customers to pay in-perpetuity, rather than producing great products. The last great product they produced was Lightroom, and I've seen nothing impressive in the CS since that (for my use). One telling result of this move is that they have now withdrawn the 'perpetual license' that they started selling last year - that lasted 1 year it seems. Perhaps this is inevitable in the mature stage of a corporation, but I'm sad to see what was once a scrappy underdog fighting the likes of quark become focussed on keeping wall street rather than their customers happy.
mathnode 13y ago
Actually, all the replacements are free: http://html.adobe.com/edge/ http://html.adobe.com/edge/ And are much less poisonous than what comes out of Fireworks for dev teams. "Turn this picture/HTML export into code please."
- johanWuyckens 13y ago
  Then you have been working with designers who were not using FW properly. I never used it to export HTML unless for a quick demonstration mock-ups.

normanv 13y ago

WebCode is a vector drawing app that instantly generates CSS+HTML, JavaScript+Canvas or SVG code. http://www.webcodeapp.com/ http://www.webcodeapp.com/ If you have a Mac, WebCode is a great alternative to Fireworks.

Osmium 13y ago
Interestingly, they also make an app called PaintCode which outputs Objective-C code: http://www.paintcodeapp.com http://www.paintcodeapp.com I'm sure they used to be part of the same app; I'm not sure when that changed or what the logic was behind it.
- PixelCut 13y ago
  We just launched WebCode about a month ago (been selling http://www.paintcodeapp.com/ http://www.paintcodeapp.com/ for more than a year). The two apps obviously share a lot of internals. We decided to make WebCode a separate app because it has an entirely different target audience.
  - terhechte 13y ago
    Avid PaintCode user here, just learned about WebCode. Interestingly, more than once I wished I had the ability to export from PaintCode to something web with CSS or Canvas. Great to know there's now an app for that, but wouldn't it make sense to kinda also have it as additional functionality (maybe in-app purchase) for Paintcode?
    - PixelCut 13y ago
      Technically, this is entirely possible. We have developer builds which support both kinds of code generators in a single app. We're still considering this.
      - Osmium 13y ago
        From my own personal perspective it might be a good idea, because I think it really messes with your branding -- I saw the WebCode page and knew it felt familiar and thought it was "that cool app that outputs Obj-C code" but looked in the feature list and couldn't find it, got very confused, and then did a google search... It doesn't help that, as far as I can see, PixelCut doesn't have its own homepage, and there's no link from the one app page to the other app page so I didn't even know they were made by the same developer without looking at the copyright notice at the bottom! Just my opinion anyway. Great app either way :)

Osmium 13y ago

My first copy of Fireworks I bought when it was still owned by Macromedia and it was wonderful; so powerful yet easy to use. It was my impression that Adobe never really "got" it, or knew how it should exist in their ecosystem as a sort-of competitor to their other products. It was sad watching it flounder, but I wonder what Adobe could've done differently.

AdamTReineke 13y ago
Macromedia Fireworks MX 2004? Loved it, was my go-to image editor for a VERY long time.
- kevinwmerritt 13y ago
  I got started designing websites using FW MX 2004 before I graduated to writing CSS first. The ability to mockup designs and then use the slice export feature was great fun. I love Fireworks.
- bredren 13y ago
  Same here. I particularly liked its ability to do frame by frame animated gif editing easily. RIP.
seanalltogether 13y ago
I feel like Adobe never really got macromedia tools at all. They knew they wanted to own the content creation market, but they never really understood the developer side of the content creation game. Fireworks is the last Adobe tool I use these days and I'm disappointed they can never understand why someone like me would continue to use it.
- richforrester 13y ago
  Adobe's own online presence is a prime example of how they don't understand the web. Same goes for the decision to drop CS and continue with only their cloud-based services: they should've done that about 10 years ago. I can't remember for how long I've been saying I'd be willing to pay monthly for their programs if there only was such a subscription. And I'm not trying to brag there. I'm meaning to say that it's ridiculous how slow they have moved. I've never met a person who didn't agree with the above. I wonder how many students would've shelled out 20 bucks a month instead of downloading Adobe's software illegally if they'd done this sooner.

kunai 13y ago

I'm a bit confused that they kept Dreamweaver but killed off Fireworks. No web designer I know even uses Dreamweaver anymore, but plenty of people still use Fireworks. Odd decision by Adobe here.

veritas20 13y ago
I'm sure that more cuts are on the way. Having a breadth of products works well for software that's distributed in a non-SaaS model. Now, that they have embraced a subscription model, expect narrowing the product suite.
- kunai 13y ago
  It's sad that so many software companies think it's a good idea to sell a "service" and not a tangible copy of bits and bytes. It's less hassle to buy CS6 once and be done with it and upgrade when you want to, rather than keep renewing subscriptions and be faced with product changes you may not necessarily like or want.
  - as_if 13y ago
    That's the trick. You get the people to pay for all eternity ;)
  - taude 13y ago
    I had CS5 Production Suite for Windows. I had to change my editing rig to OS X but at the time CS 6 had already come out and Adobe only was doing the OS-switching on the current version of the release of their software. So, they got me, and I had to do the creative cloud for $70/month (I didn't want to commit for the year). I'm now waiting for the Final Cut Pro X/Motion to go on sale again, and wil be paying a one time fee of $250-$350 for Apple's editing solution. (I'm hoping I can get by on FCP, since the price is definitely appealing). So, it might be "less hassle" or not...but it's definitely better for predictable revenues selling a monthly/yearly subscription, especially with the lack of tangible competition for some of the products.
harrisonweber 13y ago

neovive 13y ago

At least FW will still be around and somewhat supported for quite a while. FW is pretty much feature-complete and can continue functioning well into the future.

georgemcbay 13y ago

I'm now conditioned to read "The Future of Product X" headlines as "Product X Has No Future". Sadly, the pattern holds here.

zeruch 13y ago

I grew to like Fireworks but can see how it could be effectively rolled into PS or Illustrator in some kind of FW compat mode if they wanted to. Which is to say they won't do that, and they'll otherwise likely screw the maximum number of users implicitly. That is unfortunate, but sadly seems like par for the course these days.

msutherl 13y ago

It's a great time to try Sketch: http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch/ http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch/. Does most of what Fireworks does much better. Unfortunately it's Mac only though.

efields 13y ago
I've been a fan of Fw for many years and now primarily use Sketch. It doesn't have the raster capabilities of Fireworks (Pixelmator's there when I need to work w/ bitmaps), but it has the same concept of Stylized Shapes and Shape Groups instead of Layers. Lately I've also enjoyed its "Copy CSS Attributes" feature for building linear gradients or shadows visually, then getting code which I can quickly use in browser.
chestnut-tree 13y ago
It would be great to see Sketch available for the PC. In the meantime, for of those on Windows, I would recommend trying Xara Photo and Graphic Designer. http://www.xara.com/uk/products/designer/ http://www.xara.com/uk/products/designer/ They have a free trial, but they are actually giving away an older version of the software for free until 20th May 2013 (in the hope that users will upgrade, no doubt) http://www.xara.com/us/specialoffers/designer/ http://www.xara.com/us/specialoffers/designer/ Xara is more of an alternative to Illustrator but it includes some basic bitmap manipulation tools. I have used Xara for many years and, in my opinion, it has a much better interface than Illustrator and is much more responsive in terms of screen redraw and speed. It's not completely equivalent to Illustrator in terms of features, but I would recommend downloading the trial (or the free version) and trying it out to see if it's suitable.

mildweed 13y ago

Does anybody have opinions on using Edge Reflow?

harrisonweber 13y ago
It is interesting, but certainly not finished software.

harrisonweber 13y ago

So, who's going to start the petition to make this open source?

martey 13y ago
Why would Adobe make Fireworks open source when they plan to continue selling and updating the last version? "While we are not planning further feature development for Fireworks, we will continue to sell Fireworks CS6 as well as make it available as part of the Creative Cloud. We will provide security updates as necessary and may provide bug fixes. We plan to update Fireworks to support the next major releases of both Mac OS X and Windows."
- harrisonweber 13y ago
  No, I wasn't saying it would actually work ;)
danboarder 13y ago
There is a petition ( http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/adobe-com-release-adobe-fireworks-to-open-source http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/adobe-com-release-adob... ) and I posted it here on HN earlier, with some discussion going on there as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5666530 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5666530 One thing that came up in the discussion was that Adobe wouldn't open source due to proprietary internal content. However I replied this may or may not be true - Adobe has open-sourced several large projects. Flex (http://www.adobe.com/products/flex.html http://www.adobe.com/products/flex.html), for example is a big software product that Adobe switched to open source in 2007. From an article back then: "Ward outlined the transition as having the following steps: Today - Creation of Mailing List for Discussion Summer 2007 - Public Bug Database and Daily Builds Second Half 2007 - Flex 3 Released December 2007 - Read Only SVN Access, Patches Welcome 2008 - Committers with Write Access, Creation of Possible Subprojects " see: http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/04/flex-open-source http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/04/flex-open-source and: http://readwrite.com/2007/04/26/adobe_takes_fle http://readwrite.com/2007/04/26/adobe_takes_fle

Semaphor 13y ago

Does anyone know of an alternative that works as well with PNGs as Fireworks does? And runs under Windows.

pornel 13y ago
Alternatives to Fireworks' PNG export (compression): http://pngquant.org http://pngquant.org or http://tinypng.org http://tinypng.org

deleted 13y ago

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webwielder 13y ago

I can't recommend Antetype enough as not so much a Fireworks replacement but rather a much better and different tool that makes screen design much more efficient and easy: http://antetype.com/ http://antetype.com/

runarb 13y ago

"Error establishing a database connection"... Looks like hn can overload even adobe.com. Or at list there blog.

camus 13y ago

Sad for Fireworks that was a very good tool for WebDesign. I might be switching to Corel Draw as I dont want to have anything to do anymore with Adobe.

brown9-2 13y ago

I wonder what the thought process was behind allowing comments on a blog posting like this.

lessnonymous 13y ago
That's an interesting question. While we're kind of taking the conversation off topic, let me speculate. Imagine, if you will, that you have a popular product that you wish to EOL. And you know that people will not be happy. In fact, there'll be people who are downright angry and feel somehow betrayed. But you're going to do it. These people want to vent their frustration. These days, they can take to Twitter, blogs and any number of sites like HN and Reddit. But what if, as you told them you were discontinuing the product, you also gave them space to scream blue murder? And they would be screaming directly at your company, without even opening a new tab in their browser. Now you've corralled at least some of the vitriol on your own platform. Now you can turn off the comments in a week or a month and all that venom disappears like it was never there. Whether this is Adobe's intention doesn't matter. It's an interesting idea none the less.
- prawn 13y ago
  If it wasn't intentional by them, you've certainly explained the benefit of it.

atechnerd 13y ago

I was suspicious that something was up with Fireworks after purchasing the web bundle for CS6 and noticing that Fireworks didn't adopt the new dark minimalist design that Photoshop and Illustrator had. I use Fireworks for all of my preliminary UI design work because it has the precision necessary to get across certain crucial design elements. Unfortunately, this is not possible with the low-fidelity wireframe alternatives and not intuitive in Adobe's other products. Yes, many of Adobe's products have overlap, but prototyping is a key part of the design workflow and deserving of a dedicated platform.

rhapsodyv 13y ago

Sadly... now that I was considering buy a licence...

ricardobeat 13y ago

The alternatives: Sketch - http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch Acorn - http://www.flyingmeat.com/acorn/ http://www.flyingmeat.com/acorn/ AnteType - http://antetype.com/ http://antetype.com/ PixelMator - www.pixelmator.com Unfortunately, none of them offers the blend of vector + raster tools that made Fireworks such a pleasure for web/UI design. Most importantly, they are mac-only and there is no interoperability - they can't read from Fireworks PNGs, and there is no suitable format to export between any of them.

kmfrk 13y ago
I keep seeing a billion alternatives suggested, but as a non-professional - and with the poor demonstrations of what they can on the websites - it's really hard to determine which does what, and which is better. Are there any good side-by-side comparisons anywhere, because there are so many options out there (at least for Mac) that I I feel that the daunting array of options is actually going to deter people like me from getting one of those programs.

gfodor 13y ago

It's weird they are killing this product because the existence of products like Sketch make it clear that there is a demand and a gap in the market for a good vector/raster tool for web design.

lessnonymous 13y ago
The existence (and ever increasing popularity) of Sketch can't be unnoticed at Adobe HQ. Therefore: 1. They're going to buy Sketch¹ 2. They're about to release a new product that replaces Fireworks 3. They're going to have some version of Photoshop and/or Illustrator capable of the same things. My guess? They're going to buy Sketch. If #2 was the case, it would have been demoed at Max. If #3 was the case, they'd have demoed at least some of those features at Max. ____ 1. When I say 'Sketch', I mean it-or-something-very-similar

mratzloff 13y ago

I can't get that upset about it. Fireworks still works and will for many years into the future. I have Fireworks CS3, and I don't really feel compelled to even upgrade to CS6.

girvo 13y ago

RIP Fireworks: I'll miss you. I started at 13, with the school's copy of Photoshop 7, building silly brushes by creating crazy polygons with 3ds Max and altering them (funnily enough, they're still online! http://girvo.deviantart.com/ http://girvo.deviantart.com/). I then began designing websites, using Photoshop, and slicing up the image with ImageReady (great for making GIFs too). But I always thought there must be a nicer way. Fireworks was that nicer way. I bought myself (with my pay saved up for months!) a copy of Macromedia's Fireworks, and lo and behold, it's perfect. The mix of raster and vector (although I had no idea what that meant technically, I appreciated it), the excellent layout tools, the brilliant UI... it was perfect. And now? Now it's dead. Thankfully, I no longer do too much graphic design, and most mockups I create are done in HTML/CSS these days. But I will miss it. Suppose it's all the more reason to learn the GIMP properly!

DigitalSea 13y ago

I knew this day was coming and yet I am still shocked. Fireworks is and always will be the best tool for wire-framing and web design, hands down. They've decided not to continue development of Fireworks and yet keep Dreamweaver? Dreamweaver is what I used for a period in my life when I was learning web development and you soon discover once you learn enough that it's horrible. I knew when Fireworks CS6 came out and Fireworks was neglected in the features and bug fixes department that it was only a matter of time. Adobe is somewhat dead to me now. I'll continue to use Fireworks until it stops working completely and once it does might consider running a VM with a version of Windows that supports it. It's time for the open source community to step up to the plate and create an open sourced version of Fireworks, heck it would be amazing if Adobe open sourced Fireworks so us die-hard users who see its potential and power continue to make it better and keep it alive for many more years to come. This wouldn't be such a bad thing if Adobe had another product like Fireworks, but they don't. Illustrator sucks for web design, Photoshop is too slow and bulky for agile web design or prototyping and the range of new applications Adobe has been bringing out don't really impress me in the slightest. The only way I can see Adobe from recovering from this is implementing some kind of way to load Photoshop in a "web mode" that gave you a similar interface as Fireworks but even then what about the features that make Fireworks so great? Pages, Master Pages, Styles, ability to click and drag elements around the canvas, Search and replace colours and fonts... This is a very bad move. Those who say it's not a big deal have obviously never used Fireworks nor used it long enough to truly appreciate just how great of a tool it is. This one particular line in the post really grinds my gears, “We understand that Fireworks has one of the most passionate communities on the web” — obviously they don't understand at all, if they understood they'd see there is a following for Fireworks. Judging by the comments on the post (and they keep on coming) everyone agrees this is a bad move, I didn't see one comment that agreed this was the right thing to do. This is an attempt to move users onto newer web tools which in my opinion don't come anywhere close to the simplicity and power of Fireworks and most likely never will. Fireworks was Adobe's only decent UX design tool and now I hope someone else see's any opportunity here to woo a very large number of Fireworks users who will be more than willing to pay for a decent and viable alternative to a very loved tool with a cult-like following. It seems like Sketch from Bohemian Coding is the only decent Fireworks alternative that's out there and it's Mac only. You could use Gimp but we all know Gimp is far from a professional alternative to anything. This is a sad day for me and a lot of other people.

elviejo 13y ago

Are there good free/open source replacements for Fireworks?

elviejo 13y ago

Are there good free/open source replacements for Fireworks?

Kiro 13y ago

Why is Fireworks so good for web design? What does it have that Photoshop doesn't?

Fletch137 13y ago

Try to get them to open-source it. It's a long shot, but worth a go, it might just save what we love about fireworks and put it in the hands of people who use it: http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/adobe-com-release-adobe-fireworks-to-open-source http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/adobe-com-release-adob...

deleted 13y ago

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daledavies 13y ago

What I don't understand is that Adobe must believe web designers aren't using Fireworks, it is something I've used since the Macromedia days so maybe I've missed out on something. If not Fireworks, what are all the web designers and developers using? Edit: To clarify I do kind of see where things are going. Fireworks has no built in support for exporting SVG or web fonts and I have not exported a background image to use on a website as a rounded corner or drop shadow in quite some time since CSS 3 has become more widely adopted. However for making reasonably accurate mock ups I've so far found no better tool than Fireworks.

Kekeli 13y ago

Well