If you've missed the news that broke yesterday, you must have been hiding under a rock (or not in the creative industry). Adobe have gone and finally put the nail in the coffin of one of the best bits of software they've ever had; Fireworks.
Ignoring my own emotions on the software, I cannot see the logic behind their decision. Sure, more people probably use Photoshop but without putting to fine a point on it, Fireworks was MADE for the web, where PS has simply been shoe-horned into being a tool that *could* be used for designing on the web.
Before the fan-wars start again, Photoshop is primarily a bitmap image editor. That's as clear as day, and thats it's heritage. Fireworks has always been a vector-based image editor, with export tools that made it much more applicable for web design than tarting up photos of kittens shot on your Nikon.
The announcement from Adobe was this :
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
Say what? You are joking right?
Ignoring Photoshop for a moment, Illustrator is a step in the right direction as it's vector based with non-destructive filters and so on, but lacks the export prowess that Fireworks has always had, from the Macromedia days. It's a great tool, but again more suitable for illustrators (go figure, eh!) than web designers.
They then suggest using Edge reflow; a product that isn't even finished! Without sounding like a broken record, it simply isn't ready to be used day-to-day by professionals. Given that it's still in development, it's very likely to change and there's a possibility that it might never get finished either. Or at least that's how I feel now. How long until Photoshop gets dropped in favour for their next-in-line?
This is a really sad day for those in the community that have been proudly using Adobe Fireworks (and accepting the abuse from Photoshop fan-boys!) for all these years.
The light at the end of the tunnel is twofold; from next month I'll be cancelling my creative cloud subscription with Adobe and taking up a separate licence with Typekit (the only other aspect of my CC subscription that I use).
I'll also be converting my web agency to use Sketch.app from Bohemian Coding from now on. I've already been using it for a little while now, and it's speed and ease-of-use make up for the smallish learning curve required for those familiar with Adobe Fireworks.
Thanks Adobe for pushing me to support a smaller, more responsive and agile designing partner that actually gives a fuck about it's users.