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Comment by shmageggy | Hacker News Reader

This looks very much like Fireworks. The author mentioned that he won't discuss it since Adobe discontinued it, but the resemblance is uncanny. I never understood why Fireworks wasn't more widely used/praised; I found it to be absolutely perfect for designing web graphics.

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Actually not much like Fireworks at all, either UI-wise or functionality wise.

It's like your basic vector editor -- most of the look and work the same.

Fireworks, besides the ugly Macromedia/Adobe GUI, was a hybrid Vector/Bitmap editor.

I never understood why hybrid vector/bitmap editors didn't gain more acceptance: it seems a natural way to work. This one-or-the-other mentality may suit developers of the software, but it's not natural for users.

I like to be able to go back and edit my shapes, yet change the contents in ways that only a bitmap editor would be able to. Storing a history of the transformations I did and re-applying when I'd resized/changed the shape seemed sensible - as well as allowing me to go back in history and remove some.

As a self-taught designer, watching professional Photoshop users for the first time was mind-boggling: they make items and then throw them away and re-make them if they need a different size - or crop parts off, rather than masking. It's all destructive editing! I learned a lot about layers and could see the benefits of them, but still...

If I remember correctly Deneba Canvas supported the hybrid Vector/Bitmap approach, but never gained enough traction to be a viable product.

I notice this about Photoshop users myself but I also notice the more time you spend using it, the biggest efficiency gains you make to your workflow come from using vector shapes and non-destructive editing (various types of masks, adjustment layer, layers with blending options). There are a few things where destruction is required but often I stash an old copy of the layer unless I'm dead set on the new version, but this can be rare. You also learn as time goes on how annoying a PSD with rasterised elements that didn't need to be rasterised are!

You should always be able to do non-destructive editing even when pretending to work destructively, by keeping around the original sources (which you keep around anyway in most cases) and the graph of operations applied (which isn't much data). Or rather, the software should be able to do that. I'm surprised that there don't seem to be any applications doing that.

I love Sketch, but I don't like Fireworks. I find Fireworks awkward and clunky.

yeah, the UI is not sexy. But the feature set that is being boasted in the article is THE SAME from firewoks around 1999.

It was the only place i could get some vector work and still be pixel perfect.

Last used photoshop in 2006 and it wasn't even close.

...sadly gimp tries too hard to be a photoshop clone even copying the lame export dialog instead of save as...

Sketch has much better support for layer and stroke styles than Fireworks did, particularly older versions of Fireworks. For example, you can apply multiple gradient layer styles to both the stroke and the fill of a rectangle in Sketch, with alpha. In Fireworks, you often had to make two or three rectangles to get the appropriate effect of a photorealistic button.

How about Inkscape?

Seems like most designers dismiss Fireworks before even giving it a chance. Once you get over the initial bump it actually feels much nicer to work with than Photoshop.

The only thing really listed in this article that Fireworks hasn't done for years is the retina capabilities.

Fireworks blows sketch out of the water performance wise and also opens layered PSDs/copy and paste support for vectors from Illustrator.

Adobe killing off Fireworks just proves how little they understand the needs of their customers.

> Adobe killing off Fireworks just proves how little they understand the needs of their customers.

"Adobe" and "customers" go together in a sentence like "hacker" and "power outage"...

I am hopeful they will turn round the company, but it'll take a while.

I've thought for a while that they are an enterprise company that thinks their customers are everyday consumers...

I think the main thing it's missing from Fireworks is a symbol library - so useful for repeating elements such as buttons, icons

in fireworks it's called "Common Library" but it's really useful for that kind of stuff. It also has "styles" functionality that flow through to all of the pages for element styles.

sorry my comment was badly worded - I meant it was missing in Sketch compared to Fireworks

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