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Comment by quink | Hacker News Reader

The perfect combination of vector and bitmap editing. I love Fireworks. My guess is that Adobe just couldn't figure out how to make it better. It was already pretty much all it needed to be by about Fireworks MX. And it remains, to this day, a very different codebase.

User-friendly but quite powerful behind the scenes. I could never get the hang of Photoshop or Illustrator. Sure, Photoshop may have features or Illustrator knows how to do text flow, but if you have creativity and you know what you want, then Fireworks does everything possible to get out of your way yet is even intuitive for beginners with the same UI. Everything is discoverable, all the features are quite orthogonal to each other and it throws open how ridiculous the need to choose between vector and bitmap everywhere else really is.

If this turns out to be true, it's a sad day.

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Agreed. I can only assume that at least 50% of the people that use Photoshop only do it because they've never tried Fireworks (or have to, because everyone else does). Of course, that means Adobe is sort of competing with it's own product, so it was inevitable that Fireworks would disappear some day.

To the best of my knowledge, Fireworks has no competitor or open source equivalent. If anyone is thinking about it, you'd have a customer for life from me.

100% agree with what you said, I use it for all my graphic design, UX design and sometimes I also stretch it to do for print graphics (yeah, for print it ends with and import to PS and export to pdf).

...but it's also buggy as hell! If you're a FW user, take PS or Illustrator for a spin and it will seem wind-fast and rock-solid in comparison. The FW codebase may be in need of a complete rewrite or hardcore refactoring considering how brittle the software feels and maybe Adobe doesn't want to have talented coders working on this, especially since PS is being slowly improved with webdev friendly features. But I really hope they change their mind ...FW is the only design tool with an UI that fits my workflow and bends around my mind instead of requiring my mind to bend around its quirks

In many ways it feels like the number one change Adobe did to Fireworks is to make it slower, for no discernible reason.

And Fireworks is quite buggy in some details, and it being a completely different codebase didn't help. I agree that AI and PS are much better in terms of stability and codebase and support, but they still feel like you're using an electric toothbrush to paint a wall.

For print graphics, it's LaTeX for me. It's not an entirely sane choice. Either that or very high resolution Fireworks, trying to deal with HTML5 (and bending that into a PDF with horrific results) or just giving up and using Word. Or Illustrator, for that matter, which is the sane choice. But Illustrator sits in an awkward gap and InDesign isn't much better either in that regard.

There's a market out there for a non-WYSIWYG application for print design.

Yes, it will be a very sad day. That program has been my bread and butter for so damn long. Photoshop and Illustrator can't even remotely compare to the power of fireworks when it comes to prototyping.

that’s a perfect summation of why i love fireworks as well. i often find it difficult to explain exactly why, but it has more to do with the way you get things done than any particular feature. i sort of grew up with it, and as such, find it very natural; have tried to adapt to similar programs but struggle as they completely break my workflow.

and i sort of saw this coming for a while now given its somewhat odd positioning in adobe's product portfolio (overlap with photoshop, illustrator) and the lack of meaningfully updates over the past few iterations (though, as mentioned, there really hasn’t been much room for improvement for a while..). i’ve looked for alternatives, but sadly, can’t seem to find anything suitable.. on the plus side though, i imagine current versions should be perfectly capable for some time to come.

it is sad day indeed though.

Wish they make it open source rather than killing it. The codebase is anyways not native adobe's.

+1 for Fireworks is my groove and Photoshop doesn't feel right. Sad indeed.

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