Recently in Fireworks Category

Have you been using the Studio 8 products to create your online content? Got some interesting work to show? Not averse to being featured in a case study and getting tons of exposure? If your answers to the last three questions are a resounding "yes" (and you missed Mike's post earlier this evening), the Studio product marketing folks are currently looking for some reference customers, and would be interested in checking out your work. Should you (or even someone you know) fit the bill, please drop a comment on this post with some details (or email me directly at sfegette AT macromedia DOT com) and I'll be sure to pass your info along for consideration.

A week or so ago we took a look at one of the new/updated panels in Fireworks 8 (the Image Editing panel), and today I'm going to run down several more that you'll find useful once you get version 8 in hand- the Auto Shape Properties, Special Characters and Align panels, and the new Add Shadow command in Fireworks 8.

Fireworks 8 has a lot of small tweaks, changes and updates that to me, aren't necessarily big enough for a dedicated feature - so for today's FOTD I wanted to cover a bunch of small tweaks that collectively make for a much, much more flexible imaging tool. There's a lot to cover (and this post won't even get close to covering them all), so let's get started!

I do a lot of asset generation in Fireworks, and often these assets are headed towards Flash. In Studio MX 2004, there were a few hitches in that workflow, primarily in that any blend modes and effects needed to be rasterized, and vector paths from Fireworks always showed up in Flash as grouped objects. If you follow a similar workflow, you'll be glad to hear that things have shored up here quite a bit in Flash 8.

Fireworks 8 got some very nice updates this release, and several of them are in the form of new SWF-based panels that either extend, or consolidate groups of functionality in Fireworks around key tasks. Today I'm going to shine a flashlight on the new Image Editing Panel in Fireworks 8- which is basically a handy centralized location for all the functions you'll need the most when editing digital photos, design comps and other bitmap images. Let's take a look.

Sometimes small updates can be important ones to note. Have you ever just wanted to open an image up in Fireworks and save it out as another format? If so, you've noted this requires an export step in earlier versions of Fireworks- not particularly intuitive for those familiar with other image-editing applications. In Fireworks 8, however, you can simply open an image and select "File > Save As..."?, choose from the variety of export filetypes that Fireworks supports, and you’re done converting the format. Sure, this isn’t exactly a huge new feature, but for adding more options to your image editing workflow, it could be a timesaver nonetheless- and a great example of the strong focus on expanded/improved workflow in Studio 8.

One of the most popular features in previous versions of Fireworks had to be the pop-up menu generator. However, despite being handy and popular, these menus had a lot of inherent problems that became evident over time (not search engine friendly/indexable, difficult to customize after the fact, maintained links in JS files, etc.). The new CSS Popup Menus feature in Fireworks 8 is a much different story, however- much more robust than any prior 'stock' pop-up menu features in Fireworks or Dreamweaver (although I still recommend learning the basics of menu generation yourself as well- visual tools are great, but understanding the underlying principles is a skill worth cultivating). Here’s the basic rundown for creating pop-up menus in Fireworks 8.