Fireworks quirks you learn to live with

As I’ve stated before, we’re big fans of Adobe Fireworks for our iPhone and Android interface design work [and for web and all that other digital stuff too]. However, for all it’s fantastic features, being “big fans” of Fireworks in practice actually requires a lot of patience and over time means you take for granted the workflow quirks you have to learn. Whilst discovering these quirks is a truly fun game for which we can only thank Adobe, when you’re up against a deadline and you can’t understand why xyz feature isn’t working I figured it might be more helpful to put together a list for my own and others benefit.

  1. When you try to export a slice in a document with a lot of slices, if the slice isn’t the top layer then it’ll look like it has completed but in fact no image will be exported.
  2. When you try to scroll through the text tool font list very quickly Fireworks will behave erratically and/or might crash.
  3. Dragging and dropping layer groups requires pixel perfect precision, often resulting in accidentally creating a sub-group a few times.
  4. You can drag and drop the tabs of open files into an order which helps your workflow… but be prepared for some pixel perfect dropping else you’ll find yourself with a totally new window being created.

Disclaimer: I shall endeavour to update the list over time, though I suspect individual workflows will offer up different quirks, and quite possibly not all quirks will apply to all users or of course all versions of Fireworks. On that note, we’re currently all still using CS4 here at Common and to be fair Adobe may have fixed some of the above in CS5. I’m sure they’ve introduced some new gems too though.

16th December 2011

Ben Childs

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