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Web Design & Productivity
Review: Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium
5/29/2007
Moving on to another prototyping addition, Adobe has beefed up Symbols in Fireworks CS3 by adding JavaScript functions and 9-slice scaling (a la Flash), calling the improved versions "rich" symbols. Rich symbols are actually enormously useful and have the potential to save a lot of time and aggravation when mocking up interfaces. Fireworks CS3 ships with a ton of widgets that mimic the look of various operating systems and frameworks, including Windows, Mac OS X, and Adobe's own Flex Builder. It's just a point of dragging a rich symbol out of the new Common Library and making any customizations using the new Symbol Properties panel. Of course, you're free to create your own rich symbols if your JavaScript mojo happens to be strong.
(Click for larger image.)
Lastly, let's talk integration, specifically with Photoshop, Flash, and Flex Builder. For the former, Fireworks now retains as much information as possible when importing Photoshop documents; filters and blend modes will now transfer into Fireworks (as live filters), and you can now open as well as save native PSD documents out of Fireworks. The same goes for Illustrator; now that Fireworks is part of the Adobe family, it figures that with access to the Illustrator file format comes the ability to import Illustrator artwork with greater fidelity than before. To test it out, I opened a slew of both Photoshop and Illustrator images with Fireworks, and it handled everything I threw at it with ease, though certain features, like Adjustment Layers in Photoshop, were not retained.
(Click for larger image.)
As far as Flash is concerned, Fireworks images that contain pages will import into Flash as separate Movie Clips, neatly organized in the Library. You can also choose to keep text and artwork editable, or convert either one to bitmaps in order to maintain appearance. Scale-9 guides made in Fireworks will also be respected when brought into Flash.
The last integration-related point has to do with Fireworks' relationship with Flex Builder (Adobe's IDE for creating Flash-based rich applications using the Flex framework). If you use the Flex rich symbols from Fireworks' Common Library, Fireworks will export out MXML (Flex's scripting language) along with the images, a fact that may not interest designer-types too terribly much, but nonetheless represents an important hand-off feature for designers working closely with programmers on Flex projects (or programmers simply looking for a mockup tool that won't require laying out the interface again after shifting work into Flex Builder). So that's a potentially nice feature, if something of a niche one.
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