Remember Fireworks?

We loved Macromedia Fireworks for its shear simplicity. Was a great tool and sadly missed. Always been on the hunt for a replacement. We have the Adobe CC Suite, luxury of a kind accountant… We use Photoshop, but its not the same, not when you just want to bash an image out… We have used Gimp, its got better over time but still… So we now use Inkscape! Totally free Open Source vector editing akin to the old MM Fireworks. We would highly recommend it to anyone. Just mentioning this as have sort of stopped using Photoshop and gone back to Inkscape recently, and updated it for the first time in years, and am very impressed with it. So thought it worthy of a recommendation here!

https://inkscape.org/

4 Likes

Fireworks problem was:

1: It was way ahead of it’s time. Best web graphic app ever.
2: It was owned by Adobe. They killed everything web related.

5 Likes

Great piece of software until Adobe bought it.
Macromedia had great ideas and developers, too bad they sold them, I still remember the first time I saw Macromedia Dreamweaver and thought “this is not like that Microsoft FrontPage :poop:, this is more advance”

4 Likes

I still use Fireworks. I reinstalled an old CS5.1 version I had and it works fine (obviously only on Windows).

I thought it was time to give it up and bought a copy of Affinity Photo - it’s very good, but I ended up going back to Fireworks, at least for the time being.

2 Likes

I still us Fireworks, never could get the hang of Photoshop.

2 Likes

If you have Adobe CC Suite you still have access to Fireworks CS6.

  • Open the Creative Cloud Desktop application installed on your computer.
  • Under File, select Preferences.
  • Then click on the Apps tab on the left side.
  • Scroll to the bottom and under Settings, select Show Older Apps

Then Fireworks should be an option available under Available in your plan on the Apps page.

2 Likes

I use Fireworks 2004 for all my graphic design work! :rofl:

3 Likes

Thank you @JBishop, I have just downloaded Fireworks. I miss it so much :laughing:

3 Likes

Fireworks was really customized for quick image work to put into websites.
I used it for years for its graphics capabiities without having to go through a bunch of PhotoShop tutorials.
Of course, I’ve been using PhotoShop for years now when Adobe took over Dreamweaver and Firefox.

I also loved the animated GIF tool’s simplicity.
And that it enabled vector images so “many” years ago.

So, this topic led me to the following link with updated alternatives & some nice graphics creation tools for Mac, too.

Graphics tools for web apps

For a free GUI tool to make app designs – web to mobile page mockups – last version 2 years ago & installs on Mac & Windows

https://pencil.evolus.vn/Features.html

https://pencil.evolus.vn/Stencils-Templates.html

Outside of the pure Web graphics tools are Design/Prototyping applications
As far as Prototyping for Mobile Apps while generating the underlying CSS and links Figma is getting high praise –

Prototyping with Figma

1 Like

There was an discussion years ago: Replacement for Fireworks, vector editor

2 Likes