Macromedia Fireworks MX 2004: Anyone have it?

Web people, does anyone here use Fireworks MX 2004? I've been thinking of getting it and want to know how it is.

:-)

I have it, and in conjunction with Dreamweaver MX04 and Flash MX04, it's a great package. Together, they make creating webpages a piece o' cake. Here's one I made for my fiancee's home business using them -

http://www.digitalimageination.com
KJ

on edit: btw, this is the first website I've created. What do ya think?

I have Dreamweaver 4.1, I'll have to upgrade to MX 2004 (which I plan to do)

Personally, I'm an Adobe user out of habit, but I bought Studio 2004 for the Flash, Dreamweaver, and Freehand...but I've found myself using Fireworks more and more lately.

If you're currently a Photoshop or Gimp user, you'll probably face some initial frustration with the interface. It's organizational structure is very different from that used by Adobe and it took me a couple of weeks to really get the hang of what features were where. The most frustrating thing about it is that Fireworks USED to have a navigational setup similar to Photoshops, but they completely redesigned it without any real rhyme or reason for the last version, which made it MUCH harder to make the Photoshop to Fireworks leap.

For web use, Fireworks greatest strength lies in its image outpyut abilities. Photoshop is a wonderful tool for generating graphics, but I've always been unhappy with its ability to publish web-ready images. Now, even my Photoshop images are sliced and optomized in Fireworks before publishing.

It's weakest areas, from the standpoint of a Photoshop user, are its layer management and modification abilities. If you are used to Photoshops wide range of layer-specific styling options, you will be disappointed with Fireworks. It can acheive the same effects as Photoshop, but it lacks the automation and requires that many effects be applied pper object rather than per-layer.

The main thing to keep in mind when evaluating Fireworks is that it IS a web-specific graphics tool. It can do many web-specific things that Photoshop cannot...it will, for example, allow you to design an entire webpage UI at once, and then spit out a fully optomized HTML page with the images when it's done (admittedly, with some questionable coding practices, but what else can you expect from generated code). Photoshop was designed to be used in a wide range of environments, ranging from web design to print houses and photo labs. You will likely never see Fireworks being used outside of web design because it simply doesn't work well for anything else. If you're needs extend into the print world, you should probably skip Fireworks in favor of something else. If you're a web designer and you have the patience to learn a tool that

I teach both Fireworks MX 2004 and Dreamweaver MX 2004 in continuing ed classes. Both programs rock!

Photoshop does everything else, better.

I've used it to create navigational bars for web sites. It's also a great tool for optimizing images for the web; file size reduction and the like. Although you can create an entire site, it is better served as a layout tool. Once created, you can import that image into Dreamweaver and use it as a template.

The problem with exporting Fireworks to HTML, is that the text is exported as a .gif or .jpg, and that increases the size of your site in Kbs, which in turn makes for some slow load times.

Though not near as powerful as Photoshop, it does have a bezier tool, and works well for drawing. I like it far more than Photoshop because of it's ability to manipulate fonts. I use it to paint race cars, and the beveling and drop shadow functions works great.



My now obsolete JK race cars for NASCAR Racing 2003.