FW8 First Impressions
Posted on: 09.14.2005
I’ve been messing around with my copy of Fireworks 8 for about 24 hours now. Here are the things that I got excited about while playing(sorted by order of excitedness):
The New Blend Modes:
I’ve been begging for this since version 4!!! I can finally start converting my PSD collection to PNG with 100% confindence. So far I haven’t found a PSD that doesn’t open perfectly. Thank you Macromedia!
Marquee to Path:
This was a very welcome addition. On my quest to convert my PSD collection to PNG I can also vectorize nearly every layer in the process. I can’t wait to offer my free web interfaces in vectorized PNG.
Quick Browse Menu:
I don’t know what else to call this feature. I was very, very surprised but also pleased to see that Macromedia did away with the horribly gigantic stroke, texture, pattern, and gradient preview menus with simple hover previews. It works like the Font chooser on the properties inspector in MX/2004. It’s so much easier to find what you looking for now.
Text on a Path:
I don’t use this feature very often but it’s nice to see that it finally works as it should have from the beginning. Before, you could create a path, attach text, and edit the text while it was on the path but you couldn’t edit the path without un-attaching it first. Now you can edit the text and the path while they are attached and see the results in real time.
New Shadow Effects:
There are two new shadow effect that seem pretty nice. Not much else to say here.
Now, these features are all well and good but there are a few bugs/pet peves that have crept into the final build. I’ll list the ones that I found within the first 5 minutes of installing:
- The Extension Manager does not recognize FW 8 and does not allow you to install extensions. Macromedia has told me that they are working on a new version and it should be out very soon though.
- The Layers panel acts really goofy in certain situations. The first thing that I do when I do a fresh install of any Macromedia product is remove all of the panels that I’ll never use and replace/rearrange the panels that I use most often. I put the Align panel on the top right and the Layers panel right below that. I found that when I minimize the Layers panel, from that point on, I can not have more than one panel un-minimized at a time. I have to drag off the other panels and re-add them to the right bar in order to get my view back the to the way I want it. Weird.
- The font preview in the properties inspector always starts at the top of the list no matter what. Before, if you selected a text object and clicked on the Font dropdown, the list would auto-select the correct/current font for the selected object. It’s really annoying that it starts at the top every time now.
- The new Align panel is really ugly on the Windows version. I couldn’t take it anymore and copied the MX 2004 align.swf over the new one.
- The Auto Shape Properties Panel only works with certain auto shapes that come with FW 8. Even some of the default FW 8 auto shapes can not be edited with this panel. To me this is a useless panel if you can only edit a handfull of the built in shapes.
