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Comment by LeftCorner | Hacker News Reader

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.

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You can open Fireworks PNG files in www.Photopea.com :) https://community.adobe.com/t5/fireworks-discussions/open-fi...

I can never forget that giddy feeling when I found out that Fireworks had native support for layered PNGs at the time.

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?

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.

Almost everyone just uses full colour these days that’s why modern editors don’t ask you to preview reducing to a limited palette like that.

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.

Or you could use the myriad of free and/or open source software including but not limited to GIMP, ImageMagick, and photopea.com.

There is absolutely zero need to keep a 22 year old copy of fireworks around just to resize and crop an image. None.

On the other hand, if you have it around anyway, there is no reason not to use it to resize an image.

I don't think there's anything a 22 year old copy of Fireworks can do that can't be done in other newer apps, but I feel like that's kinda irrelevant. Some people would rather spend their time learning how to do something new rather than learning how to do the same old thing in new ways.

I used Fireworks back in school and from what I remember it was a lot easier to use than Adobes products.

https://squoosh.app/ Web app that has much better encoders.

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