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Page 1 of 3 Every new product release from a major company is accompanied by a good dose of hype and hoopla, and Macromedia is no exception. Now that the latest and greatest version of the MX Studio has been announced it's time to take a look at what the newest version of Fireworks MX has to offer. In this article you'll get a run-down of the new features found in Fireworks MX 2004 and find out if Macromedia has hit nothing but home runs with this version or if there are some singles or foul balls in the mix. Below you'll find my take on what are the best--and worst--of Fireworks MX '04.
Fireworks MX 2004 has some new attributes that are clearly winners. While not every change in the latest version of Fireworks falls into this category, you'll find these new features and revisions to be the most significant of the bunch.
Beyond any new tools or features that are included in Fireworks MX 2004 the changes to the underpinnings of the program are the most significant. You can't see it on screen, and it may not fall into a new tool category, but the fact is that the latest version of Fireworks is noticeably tighter, leaner, and faster. In fact, almost everything you do in MX '04 feels faster, from making pixel selections, to applying complex effects like Gaussian blurs, to simply moving objects around on the canvas.
One of the real benefits of these improvements will come in the area of batch processes, where common procedures as doing batch resizing of images can be completed in significantly less time than what was possible in previous versions of Fireworks. In some of the testing I've done I've seen side-by-side improvements of up to 40% when batch processing images in FW MX '04 when compared to Fireworks MX.
Fireworks has always been a bit slow, and on some systems could be a downright dog. These improvements to the engineering core of Fireworks MX '04 are significant and will undoubtedly be the single most noticeable change in the latest version of Fireworks.
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I've been fascinated by the new tools that have been added
for creating complex shapes. Located in the Tools panel on the same fly
out as the basic Rectangle, Ellipse and Polygon tools are a whole array
of new shapes that can be drawn and edited right on the canvas. As you look at the list of tools displayed on the left you can see that there are a number of fascinating new shapes available with this feature, but the fun only begins when you draw an object with one of the Auto Shape tools. Not only can you create an arrow in a snap, for instance, but by grabbing and dragging one of the control handles that appear with each shape you can modify the shape directly on the canvas. While these control handles aren't labeled, a helpful tool tip appears when you place your Pointer over the top of the handle. it takes a little while to get accustomed to what happens when you change the location of the handle, but the variety of effects are pretty impressive. You can see below some changes that were made to a basic arrow by simply changing the position of the control handles.
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The same technology that powers the Auto shapes in the Tools panel is available in a new panel that has been added in fireworks MX 2004, and available to outside developers who want to develop their own Auto shapes. Programmed through JavaScript, the Extending Fireworks MX 2004 details how 3rd party developers can create and distribute their own Auto shapes. Much like the extensibility that was added with Fireworks MX, this new feature will make it possible for others to extend the capabilities of MX '04 by programming their own shapes.
You can see some of the Auto shapes that ship with FW MX '04 in the screen capture above. Just as with the shapes in the Tools panel each of the shapes can be modified on the canvas by moving or clicking on the small yellow control handles that appear when the shape is selected. The picture frame, for instance, has a control handle at the bottom that allows you to change the fill pattern by sliding the handle left or right, as well as handles that allow you to change the shape of the corners and the width of the frame. The picture frame will even snap to a bitmap image on the canvas when it is dragged from the panel onto the canvas. All pretty slick.
As with the shapes drawn from the Tools panel, each Auto shape that is dragged from the Shapes panel can have its basic fill and stroke attributes changed and can have effects applied to it as you see in the example of the cube shape below.
New in the Live Effects panel are some great new blur and noise effects. As with other effects, these cool "filters" can be applied, removed and modified at will. Unlike real filters you find in other programs, this ability to apply these effects keeps them fully editable, a major advantage of the feature that has been found in Photoshop for some time. I'm not sure which one I like the best, but you can see examples of some of the effects possible with these new tools below.
While the Noise effect may not seem like a home run, it's an incredibly useful tool to have around. Applying a little bit of noise to an image that you draw with vector tools can give the image a more natural organic look, and noise can also be very helpful for smoothing out gradients and for making small adjustments to photos.
While this may seem like another small thing, the ability to create custom anti-alias settings and to use system anti-aliasing is a huge step forward in improving the way that Fireworks renders small text on screen. For font sizes less that 12 pixels it's been very difficult to get clear and easy to read fonts out of Fireworks. Combine the small fonts with a complex background such as a gradient or pattern fill and it can be very frustrating to get clear sharp text that isn't either too jagged or too fuzzy. Custom anti-aliasing puts you firmly in control of the output of your text and makes it possible to make small adjustments that can lead to big improvements.
Next: The Base Hits
Keywords
Fireworks MX 2004, Auto shapes, red eye tool, Fireworks new features
