Sarthak Singhal

Hope you all had a good relaxing time with family at respective homes. I welcome you all back as we will gear ahead towards understanding the details of Fireworks CS4 release. In the past posts I have tried to sum up some of the details but will try explaining things on a feature viz feature basis.

I want to thank all the visitors of my blog for their support and the excellent comments which have kept me on my toes. I have been posting for some time and would like to know now if you all are expecting something different. With the information bank I have related to Fireworks I tend to assume that knowledge restricting me from posting them.

I am still on an extended vacation and will try to moderate this blog to the best of my capacities till I reach back office. With the economic slowdown and turmoil at multiple places in the world, let us all pray for a prosperous and safe year 2009. Good luck for the year ahead.

Posted by Sarthak Singhal at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

On the eve of Christmas, on behalf of the entire engineering team of Fireworks I wish all of you a merry Christmas. Have a very happy and joyous upcoming New Year 2009. When we come back in the new year we will discuss more ways of digging deeper into Fireworks and its capacities. Till then have a great time relaxing.

Below I have posted some of the designs created by one of the users of Fireworks CS4. Hope you enjoy them.

Visit www.i2fly.com for more information about the designer

With your Fireworks engineer signing off this year, we will meet again in the new year 2009.

Posted by Sarthak Singhal at 04:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Users facing the text bounding box issue can breathe a sign of relief as there is a workaround for that problem. As a temporary solution is through an extension which will correct all text objects whose blue colored bounding box has been shifted in the document.

Important Note:

1. Running this script will correct the bounding boxes for all text objects in the document affected by this bug. This correction is limited for that png file edit session only. The bug may be encountered again during future file edits where the extension script will need to be executed again.

2. Any CS3 text element if present inside a Group ONLY will get re-rendered on running this script. After installing this extension, you can access this script from Commands menu-->Re-sync Text

This extension will not touch any text elements containing missing fonts. The missing fonts dialog pops up when opening a png file which contains fonts not found on the system.

Thus there is no need to worry about CS3 text and missing text getting re-rendered unnecessarily on using this Extension.

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=extensionDetail&loc=en_us&extid=1706527

Re-sync Text Bounding Box is a simple Extension which will go through each and every text element present in a png document (be it inside a page or a layer or a state) and re-align its bounding box.

EXAMPLE:

The following is the screen shot of a file which got affected by this problem.

After running the extension script mentioned in the above link, the following is the state of text objects.

Posted by Sarthak Singhal at 02:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Adobe Fireworks CS4 extending document is live with the new document containing all the changes in the API for the product. The same document is also available as a pdf file which can be saved on you local disk for referring to it while you are disconnected.

Web Help Link

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Fireworks/10.0_Extending/index.html

Downloading PDF Link

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Fireworks/10.0_Extending/fireworks_cs4_extending.pdf

Utilize the power of JavaScript interpreter built into Fireworks to enhance your productivity. To give you some examples, many panels have been built entirely using this technique. Some of them are Path, Align, Export to AIR panels.

Explore the power within the application.

Posted by Sarthak Singhal at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have seen that users of Fireworks are running into issues where the design job is lost while saving the file. I admit to this begin a huge frustration for the users and we will work on to better it. Till that time a useful utility is present at the following web address which can save the png file automatically for you.

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=extensionDetail&loc=en_us&extid=1698332

This is an AIR application which will save your work automatically. It will not update the original png file but will create a folder FWAIRBackup where the auto saved png file will be placed. The extension will successfully work in versions CS3 and CS4 of Fireworks. The only requirement is that AIR run time needs to be installed which can be downloaded from http://www.adobe.com/products/air/

Further details of the extension can be obtained from the first link. Any other doubts or queries post them right away.

Posted by Sarthak Singhal at 06:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

You might have noticed it already—when you launch Help from any of your CS4 products, you now have a much wider pool of knowledge to get information from. Earlier, all the information that you could get when you launched Help was from the content created by Adobe. Now, we know it is impossible to have all features, all scenarios, and all conditions documented at the time of release.

Welcome to Community Help.

Starting with CS4, Help launches the Community Help landing page—where you get a one-page view of what’s new, what’s hot, and some selected pickings from the wide variety of content sourced from the user community—that includes you. Take a look at the select video tutorials, blog entries, or see if any of the issues that you faced have a technical resolution posted on Adobe Support site. Needless to say, you can search for any of the content too.

One of the best features that I liked about is that you can effectively enhance the existing Help content on the web page with the commenting feature. You might have noticed that I added a few links to some very useful extensions on Adobe Exchange. So, I added a link to the Fireworks Exchange page for the  Inherit Guides extension (http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=extensionDetail&loc=en_us&extid=1333018) on the Help page for adding, editing, and deleting pages: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Fireworks/10.0_Using/WS4c25cfbb1410b0021e63e3d1152b00db4b-7f82.html

Now, everyone is a Help author!

So, if you have a great web site that contains some valuable tips for Fireworks users, go ahead, and post them as comments at the relevant Help pages. Or, if you have a tip to share, add them as comments. You even get some community points for suggestions and inputs that benefit the community.

And now, there is a cool short web page that lists all the options of Community Help: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/CommunityHelp/

And don’t forget that Fireworks Community Help home page is here: http://www.adobe.com/support/fireworks/

Posted by Sarthak Singhal at 05:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Two new articles have been posted at Fireworks Developer Center on www.adobe.com. The actual links for the articles are mentioned below. For people new to this location, it houses articles, extensions which range from traditional usage of Fireworks to extending the functionality to its limits. Explore the following new articles apart from the old ones which are a good read.

Lorem Ipsum placeholder text generator for Fireworks
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/fireworks/articles/loremipsum_panel.html

Workspace Manager panel in Fireworks CS4
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/fireworks/articles/workspace_manager_panel.html

Posted by Sarthak Singhal at 05:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Easter egg is a hidden feature of Fireworks which is no way related to the functionality of the product. It is a flash demo which contains photos of a lot of people who are involved with the building on Fireworks over different versions. To access the feature go to menu item

• MAC: Fireworks -> About Fireworks CS4...
• WIN: Help -> About Fireworks...

The about dialog will pop up. Now press Control on Mac or Win and a single mouse click on the FW icon. Be patient! This will pop up the faces of people who work quite hard to bring the various versions of Firework to you. I am also in one of the images. You just need to hunt me down!. This trick can be found in earlier versions of Fireworks also.

Posted by Sarthak Singhal at 04:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)