The Future of Adobe Fireworks | Hacker News Reader

The Future of Adobe Fireworks

blogs.adobe.com

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I'm now conditioned to read "The Future of Product X" headlines as "Product X Has No Future".

Sadly, the pattern holds here.

The alternatives:

Sketch - http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch

Acorn - http://www.flyingmeat.com/acorn/

AnteType - 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.

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.

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.

Macromedia Fireworks MX 2004? Loved it, was my go-to image editor for a VERY long time.

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.

Same here. I particularly liked its ability to do frame by frame animated gif editing easily. RIP.

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.

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.

As a student, I still feel like their subscription model needs work. $20 a month is too much for a single application, especially when it requires a year-long commitment. $30 for the academic subscription is a good deal because it includes everything, but I only use a few of the programs. Again, this option requires a year-long commitment.

For an educational license, I'd gladly pay $10 for Photoshop. For a commercial license, I'd pay $20, but only if I could cancel at any time.

Fair enough, but at the very least, $20 (or even $60) a month sure beats the hell out of paying $2000 in one go, in my opinion.

Or to put it the way Adobe should've thought of it:

Assuming $50 a month (I pay more atm) over the 10 years since I quit school, Adobe could've made 6000 dollars on me.

Instead, they made 0.

(up until they launched creative cloud, that is)

It does, but before the subscription program, I wouldn't be surprised if 98% of users had pirated copies.

The subscription fees are much more reasonable, but I'd be astonished if the rate of piracy has changed more than a few percentage points.

I wonder if lowering the price to something around $9.99 or $14.99 and dropping the annual contract would grow the user base enough to increase overall revenue.

>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.

How is that a substantiated argument?

Tons of people say otherwise -- that they won't go with this new model.

And 10 years ago (when nobody was doing it, so it was even more alien, and internet speeds were lower) a lot more people would have hated it too.

Macromedia was bought more because of it's foray into the mobile space. This is back when adobe still considered Flash Light to be a viable path.

Macromedia never really got (some of) Macromedia tools either. I used to work on Fireworks. I don't mean I was using it; I was building it. It was always a red-headed stepchild, though. It went through as many near-death experiences as Apple, though the outside world never heard about it. It was the only product being built in Texas, a result of MM's strategy of growing by acquisition and spinning off products to avoid antitrust problems, and one day Macromedia closed down the whole office to cut costs and laid off everyone who wouldn't move to Silicon Valley. A few (very few) came up, but since they were now here in Tech Mecca, most no longer wanted to be on the career-limiting Fireworks team anymore. People on other teams doing cosmetic cross-product UI synchronization gave Fireworks the same cosmetic makeover to make it appear to still be alive, so upgrades were sold, and eventually it gathered a few new devs and muddled through.

It always had a passionate user base, which was always very small. It, like a font editor, a sound editor, and several other products that were canceled just didn't belong in a big company, but it always just barely survived the "product layoffs"--but just barely. My guess is that the CTO, Kevin Lynch (now at Apple) was personally fond of it and wouldn't let it die but couldn't afford to feed it or pay any attention to it, either. It should have been given to a small, lifestyle software company that would have loved it, cared for it, and lived well off its meager sales.

The big problem was that the Web devs who paid for software always had Photoshop, and most assumed that anything that Fireworks could do, Photoshop could, too, so why buy and learn another photo editor? Before they acquired Macromedia, Adobe always used to spread this FUD, and after the acquisition, they couldn't afford to say anything different about such a small product.

Oh, well. This is now an opportunity for someone much smaller than Adobe to create Fireworks II for that small, passionate market.

very interesting comment , and what do you do now? Cant not you launch that FW2 product that a lot of people want ? What's makes fireworks great is that is it people who actually extend it ( using flash or javascript ). Photoshop is a lot more difficult to extend. Also Fireworks is easier to use for webdev.

Sadly, all of Macromedia products didn't have place in ADobe ecosystem except Flash. Fireworks, Director, and my favorite Freehand. FH11, we had so much fun and productive times together! Only did I switch fully (mentally) to Illustrator with CS4.

As a long time Flash and Director user before going Unity, Director was dropped by Adobe the day it was bought. It has been on EOL since the aquisition. They had the lead on 3d on the web then and they let it slip. There have been no real updates to Director since 9 when Macromedia still had a hand in it. The recent releases were just to make people think it was still alive, no big loss except for Adobe and market share.

Freehand was awesome and Fireworks will be missed, it's too bad Macromedia did get bought by Adobe really, things would be so different. It was great for competition and Flash would have gone native and hardware accelerated much earlier.

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.

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.

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.

That's the trick.

You get the people to pay for all eternity ;)

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.

I agree. I'm sure Dreamweaver has its set of dedicated, erm, beginner users, but the Edge family was essentially created to replace Dreamweaver.

Many Coldfusion developers use it, can't imagine many others do but perhaps I'm wrong.

Anecdote here: I'm a CF dev (shudder, I know) and everyone on my team hates Dreamweaver.

In fact, Adobe has an IDE called ColdFusion Builder (we don't use it though), so I have no idea who still uses Dreamweaver: http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion-builder.html

I did CF over a decade ago, I remember this: http://nowostey.net/uploads/posts/2010-01/1264151016_84f0bc9... was one of the first things that I really liked that was killed by the Allaire -> Macromedia -> Adobe mergers. I'm not sure if I can blame adobe for that as Macromedia just left it to die.

I used to love CF Studio (the CF version of Homesite) and only gave it up 12 months ago. I was using a version that hadn't been updated for perhaps a decade or more. Couldn't get used to anything else I tried.

(Now using Sublime Text with the colour scheme tweaked to mimic CF Studio...)

You'd be very surprised at how widely it is still used, especially in schools, colleges, and universities. I know for a fact that my old college still teaches "Web Design" with Dreamweaver (even though coding is nothing to do with design).

I moderate a fairly popular Web Design/Development forum, and it's shocking how many people still post about Dreamweaver, especially users from India and Eastern Europe.

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

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.

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/

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/

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.

WebCode is a vector drawing app that instantly generates CSS+HTML, JavaScript+Canvas or SVG code.

http://www.webcodeapp.com/

If you have a Mac, WebCode is a great alternative to Fireworks.

Interestingly, they also make an app called PaintCode which outputs Objective-C code: 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.

We just launched WebCode about a month ago (been selling 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.

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?

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.

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 :)

Sketch is also wonderful. The thing is, Fireworks has the Bitmap editing involved too which is really nice to have on hand in the same program.

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/).

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!

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.

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.

You pretty much wrote exactly what I was thinking, although you probably expressed it better.

I am lucky enough to have had a copy of cs6 purchased for me by my employer (to use as a hobbyist at home) and to be honest at the moment I can't envisage needing to upgrade for quite some time.

When I do feel the need to upgrade in like 5 or 6 years time when CC has been updated so much I feel like using CS6 is like living in the dark ages, I hope my employer is good enough to buy me a subscription or it looks like I'm stuck.

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.

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-adob...

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.

> 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?

The monthly creative suite subscription is a pretty good deal and lets you download/use all the cs apps.

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.

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.

Actually, all the replacements are free: 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."

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.

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

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.

If it wasn't intentional by them, you've certainly explained the benefit of it.

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/

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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."

No, I wasn't saying it would actually work ;)

There is a petition ( 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

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), 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

and: http://readwrite.com/2007/04/26/adobe_takes_fle

Does anybody have opinions on using Edge Reflow?

It is interesting, but certainly not finished software.

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

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

Are there good free/open source replacements for Fireworks?

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

Well

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.

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