I remember how Fireworks *felt* to use. Just seeing that name written again gave me warm fuzzy feelings. Fireworks came about at a time when web design was almost entirely something you did in HTML. The workflow to go from bitmap to web was really bad, so most of us just did things natively.
Fireworks was the first tool that allowed you to draw, but maintain the constraints (and portability) of HTML and CSS as it came in to prominence.
The closest thing I have had to that feeling again was when a friend of mine did some design for me and shared it in Figma. What I thought were bitmaps were vectors!! I had so much fun bringing that in to my site (which I ended up doing in Webflow, because apparently I haven't kept up with the times enough to hand code reasonably quickly).
I've used the latest and greatest Adobe products, they definitively do not have this feeling. There is really no delight to be found. I know they are incredibly powerful and near and dear to many people, but for the young and restless they are boring.
I was part of the first wave of animators who found Flash and mucked around in it - I made a cartoon early on that went viral before that was a thing.
An exe file as an attachment to an email, that went round the world. Crazy days.
Fireworks was the first tool that allowed you to draw, but maintain the constraints (and portability) of HTML and CSS as it came in to prominence.
The closest thing I have had to that feeling again was when a friend of mine did some design for me and shared it in Figma. What I thought were bitmaps were vectors!! I had so much fun bringing that in to my site (which I ended up doing in Webflow, because apparently I haven't kept up with the times enough to hand code reasonably quickly).
I've used the latest and greatest Adobe products, they definitively do not have this feeling. There is really no delight to be found. I know they are incredibly powerful and near and dear to many people, but for the young and restless they are boring.