
The Future of Adobe Fireworks - dinosaurs
http://blogs.adobe.com/fireworks/2013/05/the-future-of-adobe-fireworks.html
======
georgemcbay
I'm now conditioned to read "The Future of Product X" headlines as "Product X
Has No Future".

Sadly, the pattern holds here.

------
ricardobeat
The alternatives:

Sketch - <http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch>

Acorn - <http://www.flyingmeat.com/acorn/>

AnteType - <http://antetype.com/>

PixelMator - www.pixelmator.com

Unfortunately, none of them offers the blend of vector + raster tools that
made Fireworks such a pleasure for web/UI design.

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.

~~~
kmfrk
I keep seeing a billion alternatives suggested, but as a non-professional -
and with the poor demonstrations of what they can on the websites - it's
really hard to determine which does what, and which is better.

Are there any good side-by-side comparisons anywhere, because there are so
many options out there (at least for Mac) that I I feel that the daunting
array of options is actually going to deter people like me from getting one of
those programs.

------
Osmium
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.

~~~
seanalltogether
I feel like Adobe never really got macromedia tools at all. They knew they
wanted to own the content creation market, but they never really understood
the developer side of the content creation game. Fireworks is the last Adobe
tool I use these days and I'm disappointed they can never understand why
someone like me would continue to use it.

~~~
richforrester
Adobe's own online presence is a prime example of how they don't understand
the web.

Same goes for the decision to drop CS and continue with only their cloud-based
services: they should've done that about 10 years ago. I can't remember for
how long I've been saying I'd be willing to pay monthly for their programs if
there only was such a subscription.

And I'm not trying to brag there. I'm meaning to say that it's ridiculous how
slow they have moved. I've never met a person who didn't agree with the above.

I wonder how many students would've shelled out 20 bucks a month instead of
downloading Adobe's software illegally if they'd done this sooner.

~~~
phaus
As a student, I still feel like their subscription model needs work. $20 a
month is too much for a single application, especially when it requires a
year-long commitment. $30 for the academic subscription is a good deal because
it includes everything, but I only use a few of the programs. Again, this
option requires a year-long commitment.

For an educational license, I'd gladly pay $10 for Photoshop. For a commercial
license, I'd pay $20, but only if I could cancel at any time.

~~~
richforrester
Fair enough, but at the very least, $20 (or even $60) a month sure beats the
hell out of paying $2000 in one go, in my opinion.

Or to put it the way Adobe should've thought of it:

Assuming $50 a month (I pay more atm) over the 10 years since I quit school,
Adobe could've made 6000 dollars on me.

Instead, they made 0.

(up until they launched creative cloud, that is)

~~~
phaus
It does, but before the subscription program, I wouldn't be surprised if 98%
of users had pirated copies.

The subscription fees are much more reasonable, but I'd be astonished if the
rate of piracy has changed more than a few percentage points.

I wonder if lowering the price to something around $9.99 or $14.99 and
dropping the annual contract would grow the user base enough to increase
overall revenue.

------
kunai
I'm a bit confused that they kept Dreamweaver but killed off Fireworks.

No web designer I know even uses Dreamweaver anymore, but plenty of people
still use Fireworks. Odd decision by Adobe here.

~~~
veritas20
I'm sure that more cuts are on the way. Having a breadth of products works
well for software that's distributed in a non-SaaS model. Now, that they have
embraced a subscription model, expect narrowing the product suite.

~~~
kunai
It's sad that so many software companies think it's a good idea to sell a
"service" and not a tangible copy of bits and bytes.

It's less hassle to buy CS6 once and be done with it and upgrade when you want
to, rather than keep renewing subscriptions and be faced with product changes
you may not necessarily like or want.

~~~
taude
I had CS5 Production Suite for Windows. I had to change my editing rig to OS X
but at the time CS 6 had already come out and Adobe only was doing the OS-
switching on the current version of the release of their software. So, they
got me, and I had to do the creative cloud for $70/month (I didn't want to
commit for the year).

I'm now waiting for the Final Cut Pro X/Motion to go on sale again, and wil be
paying a one time fee of $250-$350 for Apple's editing solution. (I'm hoping I
can get by on FCP, since the price is definitely appealing).

So, it might be "less hassle" or not...but it's definitely better for
predictable revenues selling a monthly/yearly subscription, especially with
the lack of tangible competition for some of the products.

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

~~~
chestnut-tree
It would be great to see Sketch available for the PC. In the meantime, for of
those on Windows, I would recommend trying Xara Photo and Graphic Designer.

<http://www.xara.com/uk/products/designer/>

They have a free trial, but they are actually giving away an older version of
the software for free until 20th May 2013 (in the hope that users will
upgrade, no doubt)

<http://www.xara.com/us/specialoffers/designer/>

Xara is more of an alternative to Illustrator but it includes some basic
bitmap manipulation tools.

I have used Xara for many years and, in my opinion, it has a much better
interface than Illustrator and is much more responsive in terms of screen
redraw and speed. It's not completely equivalent to Illustrator in terms of
features, but I would recommend downloading the trial (or the free version)
and trying it out to see if it's suitable.

------
normanv
WebCode is a vector drawing app that instantly generates CSS+HTML,
JavaScript+Canvas or SVG code.

<http://www.webcodeapp.com/>

If you have a Mac, WebCode is a great alternative to Fireworks.

~~~
Osmium
Interestingly, they also make an app called PaintCode which outputs
Objective-C code: <http://www.paintcodeapp.com>

I'm sure they used to be part of the same app; I'm not sure when that changed
or what the logic was behind it.

~~~
PixelCut
We just launched WebCode about a month ago (been selling
<http://www.paintcodeapp.com/> for more than a year). The two apps obviously
share a lot of internals. We decided to make WebCode a separate app because it
has an entirely different target audience.

~~~
terhechte
Avid PaintCode user here, just learned about WebCode. Interestingly, more than
once I wished I had the ability to export from PaintCode to something web with
CSS or Canvas. Great to know there's now an app for that, but wouldn't it make
sense to kinda also have it as additional functionality (maybe in-app
purchase) for Paintcode?

~~~
PixelCut
Technically, this is entirely possible. We have developer builds which support
both kinds of code generators in a single app. We're still considering this.

~~~
Osmium
From my own personal perspective it might be a good idea, because I think it
really messes with your branding -- I saw the WebCode page and knew it felt
familiar and thought it was "that cool app that outputs Obj-C code" but looked
in the feature list and couldn't find it, got very confused, and then did a
google search...

It doesn't help that, as far as I can see, PixelCut doesn't have its own
homepage, and there's no link from the one app page to the other app page so I
didn't even know they were made by the same developer without looking at the
copyright notice at the bottom!

Just my opinion anyway. Great app either way :)

------
girvo
RIP Fireworks: I'll miss you.

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! <http://girvo.deviantart.com/>).

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.

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.

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.

Suppose it's all the more reason to learn the GIMP properly!

------
atechnerd
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.

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.

Yes, many of Adobe's products have overlap, but prototyping is a key part of
the design workflow and deserving of a dedicated platform.

------
DigitalSea
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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

~~~
daledavies
You pretty much wrote exactly what I was thinking, although you probably
expressed it better.

I am lucky enough to have had a copy of cs6 purchased for me by my employer
(to use as a hobbyist at home) and to be honest at the moment I can't envisage
needing to upgrade for quite some time.

When I do feel the need to upgrade in like 5 or 6 years time when CC has been
updated so much I feel like using CS6 is like living in the dark ages, I hope
my employer is good enough to buy me a subscription or it looks like I'm
stuck.

------
neovive
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.

------
Fletch137
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: [http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/adobe-com-release-
adob...](http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/adobe-com-release-adobe-
fireworks-to-open-source)

------
zeruch
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.

------
Zikes
> 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.

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?

~~~
aaronblohowiak
The monthly creative suite subscription is a pretty good deal and lets you
download/use all the cs apps.

~~~
grey-area
It's certainly a very good deal for Adobe.

As a customer I don't feel it's a good deal for me at all as it forces me to
pay for upgrades and products many of which I don't want, and divorces the
money I pay from any specific product, so that I can no longer choose to
reward products which address my needs, and ignore those which don't. I have
no particular attachment to Fireworks for example, but Adobe streamlining
their product offering and making it into a subscription suite only subsidises
things like Adobe Bridge which simply shouldn't exist, at the expense of apps
and features which customers actually want. It's around $80 a month in the UK
for Adobe CC, and of course they will increase this gradually over time as
more customers are locked in.

Given the CS updates of the last few years, I have trouble finding reasons to
upgrade from CS5, which works fine for me currently, and have no interest in
paying them money every month to change the UI around arbitrarily and add more
misfeatures like 'Save for Microsoft Office' in CS Illustrator, or reinforce
the lack of working interchange between InDesign CS versions (in order to
force upgrades). As a long-term customer it feels like Adobe updates are now
more focussed on forcing participation in the upgrade treadmill than adding
features or improving performance, and this move to subscription pricing with
a 'creative cloud' just reinforces this trend - Adobe is now all about
customer lock-in and forcing customers to pay in-perpetuity, rather than
producing great products. The last great product they produced was Lightroom,
and I've seen nothing impressive in the CS since that (for my use). One
telling result of this move is that they have now withdrawn the 'perpetual
license' that they started selling last year - that lasted 1 year it seems.

Perhaps this is inevitable in the mature stage of a corporation, but I'm sad
to see what was once a scrappy underdog fighting the likes of quark become
focussed on keeping wall street rather than their customers happy.

------
brown9-2
I wonder what the thought process was behind allowing comments on a blog
posting like this.

~~~
lessnonymous
That's an interesting question. While we're kind of taking the conversation
off topic, let me speculate.

Imagine, if you will, that you have a popular product that you wish to EOL.
And you know that people will not be happy. In fact, there'll be people who
are downright angry and feel somehow betrayed. But you're going to do it.

These people want to vent their frustration. These days, they can take to
Twitter, blogs and any number of sites like HN and Reddit.

But what if, as you told them you were discontinuing the product, you also
gave them space to scream blue murder? And they would be screaming directly at
your company, without even opening a new tab in their browser.

Now you've corralled at least some of the vitriol on your own platform. Now
you can turn off the comments in a week or a month and all that venom
disappears like it was never there.

Whether this is Adobe's intention doesn't matter. It's an interesting idea
none the less.

~~~
prawn
If it wasn't intentional by them, you've certainly explained the benefit of
it.

------
webwielder
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: <http://antetype.com/>

------
daledavies
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.

If not Fireworks, what are all the web designers and developers using?

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.

------
gfodor
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.

~~~
lessnonymous
The existence (and ever increasing popularity) of Sketch can't be unnoticed at
Adobe HQ. Therefore:

1\. They're going to buy Sketch¹

2\. They're about to release a new product that replaces Fireworks

3\. They're going to have some version of Photoshop and/or Illustrator capable
of the same things.

My guess? They're going to buy Sketch. If #2 was the case, it would have been
demoed at Max. If #3 was the case, they'd have demoed at least _some_ of those
features at Max.

____

1\. When I say 'Sketch', I mean it-or-something-very-similar

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

~~~
pornel
Alternatives to Fireworks' PNG export (compression): <http://pngquant.org> or
<http://tinypng.org>

------
mratzloff
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.

------
harrisonweber
So, who's going to start the petition to make this open source?

~~~
martey
Why would Adobe make Fireworks open source when they plan to continue selling
and updating the last version?

" _While we are not planning further feature development for Fireworks, we
will continue to sell Fireworks CS6 as well as make it available as part of
the Creative Cloud. We will provide security updates as necessary and may
provide bug fixes. We plan to update Fireworks to support the next major
releases of both Mac OS X and Windows._ "

~~~
harrisonweber
No, I wasn't saying it would actually work ;)

------
mildweed
Does anybody have opinions on using Edge Reflow?

~~~
harrisonweber
It is interesting, but certainly not finished software.

------
runarb
"Error establishing a database connection"... Looks like hn can overload even
adobe.com. Or at list there blog.

------
Kiro
Why is Fireworks so good for web design? What does it have that Photoshop
doesn't?

------
elviejo
Are there good free/open source replacements for Fireworks?

------
rhapsodyv
Sadly... now that I was considering buy a licence...

------
Kekeli
Well

------
camus
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.

