The Future of Adobe Fireworks

I'm now conditioned to read "The Future of Product X" headlines as "Product X Has No Future".<p>Sadly, the pattern holds here.

The alternatives:<p>Sketch - <a href="http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch" rel="nofollow">http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch</a><p>Acorn - <a href="http://www.flyingmeat.com/acorn/" rel="nofollow">http://www.flyingmeat.com/acorn/</a><p>AnteType - <a href="http://antetype.com/" rel="nofollow">http://antetype.com/</a><p>PixelMator - www.pixelmator.com<p>Unfortunately, none of them offers the blend of vector + raster tools that made Fireworks such a pleasure for web/UI design.<p>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.

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.

I'm a bit confused that they kept Dreamweaver but killed off Fireworks.<p>No web designer I know even uses Dreamweaver anymore, but plenty of people still use Fireworks. Odd decision by Adobe here.

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

WebCode is a vector drawing app that instantly generates CSS+HTML, JavaScript+Canvas or SVG code.<p><a href="http://www.webcodeapp.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.webcodeapp.com/</a><p>If you have a Mac, WebCode is a great alternative to Fireworks.

RIP Fireworks: I'll miss you.<p>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! <a href="http://girvo.deviantart.com/" rel="nofollow">http://girvo.deviantart.com/</a>).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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...<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

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: <a href="http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/adobe-com-release-adobe-fireworks-to-open-source" rel="nofollow">http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/adobe-com-release-adob...</a>

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.

&#62; 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.<p>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?

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

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: <a href="http://antetype.com/" rel="nofollow">http://antetype.com/</a>

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.<p>If not Fireworks, what are all the web designers and developers using?<p>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.

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

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?

Does anybody have opinions on using Edge Reflow?

"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.