Scriptplayground Network

Adobe Fireworks CS4 - Learning Center

What's New in Fireworks CS4

Text Engine

You will notice the developers have made some wonderful advancements in the text engine inside Fireworks CS4. Fireworks now shares the same engine that Photoshop uses. This means more consistent text when working on documents across the suite products. Support for Ligatures and font style have also been added.

Fireworks CS4 now also allows you to create flowing text inside a closed path. This gives you the ability to create some very unique designs, all while being able to retain the ability to update and modify the text.

back to top

Style Improvements

Fireworks now gives designers the ability to create style sets, which can be linked to various objects and shapes in the current document. [link to tutorial].

Multiple documents open will display the various style information using the dropdown menu in the Styles panel.

You can access document styles from the Property Inspector. This PI also has tools available to quickly redefine, break link delete or override the styles.

Fireworks also comes with new style sets right out of the "box".

back to top

Tooltips

Tooltips can be found all over the application. No more looking at the property inspector while positioning objects. You will find the Tooltips option located under the View menu, which is also CMD/CTRL + ]. This small addition is a huge timesaver when your attempting to position a bunch of elements quickly.

back to top

Live Gradients, Patterns, and Masks

Fireworks CS4 allows you to work with gradients in real time on the canvas. You no longer need to drag and drop just to preview the placement of the gradient. All gradient types are supported as well as patterns and masks. Video Demonstration of Live Gradients.

back to top

CSS/Images Export

Fireworks CS4 comes with a really cool improvement for web designers. That is the ability to export standard-based HTML and proper style code without resorting to using tables and 1-pixel gif shims. In fact, you can even export a special layout type that can be further tweaked within Dreamweaver. You will find a new slice type called "Background image" which allows you to define a section of your layout as a background image.

Fireworks will warn you if your layout is using a non-standard font style that wouldn't be found in a browser.

As if thats not enough right there, Fireworks will even export HTML rich symbols as normal HTML controls, automatically. For instance, if you have a button in your layout, Fireworks will create the proper <input> code, as well as create the <form> wrap. This truly is rapid prototyping, but can easily turn into final development with very minimal edits.

back to top

Export to PDF

Another new workflow improvement in Fireworks CS4 is the ability to export a clickable prototype of your web site to an interactive Adobe PDF. This means you no longer have to send out a fully functional mockup for approval. You can also take advantage of the commenting ability within Adobe PDFs, which allows you to clearly share comments with all the parties involved in the design and review process. This will be a welcomed tool to designers that have been "ripped off" in the past by clients that decide to disappear in the night with a fully functional layout only to have someone else "build" it.

back to top

Performance

Adobe has really listened to the Fireworks users this time around and fixed a lot of bugs and memory leaks that you may have suffered from in previous versions. Vista users will really be able to rejoice, because Fireworks CS4 has resolved a lot of critical performance issues that affected the brush tool, as well as any other tool that displayed a preview.

Fireworks also had some pretty critical memory leaks, that appeared in CS3. Those have also been fixed. All around you will notice extreme performance increases in Fireworks CS4.. which is great news for everyone.

You will also notice a great improvement in load times. No more sluggish movement in documents that contained a lot of pages, layers and states. It is important to note that existing CS3 documents will not show a speed increase until they are re-saved as a CS4 document. This basically means you need to open your CS3 documents and save them as CS4 in order to truly see what Fireworks performance increases have to offer.

back to top

Asynchronous Saving

Even saving in Fireworks has been improved. Your documents are now saved asynchronously, which means you can be working on document X while document Y is being saved. However, "async" saving doesn't stop at various documents, you can even save a large document and continue working on it.

As you may now notice, Fireworks CS4 doesn't only come with a really cool set of new features, but really allows you to be efficient professionals using the tools and techniques you are familiar with. This easily has to be one of if not the largest Fireworks release to date.

back to top

What is beta?
Beta means the product still probably has issues, but that shouldn't stop you from enjoying it. However, that being said, it is not advised to use beta software in a mission critical project. Nothing is stopping you from doing so, its just not normally a good idea.

Top