Posted 10:48 am by jonathan & filed under CorelDRAW, Fireworks, Photoshop.
So by now, I am sure you guys have read the news that Adobe has the brought Fireworks' life-cycle to end; Fireworks 1998/2013. It was an inevitable decision and has been on the cards for a long time, I know that with every release of CS since the acquisition of Macromedia I was always surprised that Fireworks made the cut each time.
Mainly for the obvious reason that they were so similar, I don't consider myself a Photoshop expert or a Fireworks expert, I am merely putting my thoughts on the situation and it's inevitable fall out online to see what others think!
Adobe's decision will definitely bring a lot of backlash from the Fireworks community and along with this Adobe also mentioned that they will be moving away for the boxed version of its software to focus more on the Creative Cloud editions and as such keeping two code bases for two very similarly products is not a viable option. I will get back to this in another article.
I would presume to help with the changeover for users of Fireworks to Photoshop that the next iteration of Photoshop will include integration of the most widely used parts of Fireworks that are already not found in Photoshop to help the users transitions.
If not something, there will definitely be opportunity for third party developers to write bespoke plug-ins for Photoshop to again help Fireworks user transition, not a bad thing at all as it could build revenue for some small team of developers.
It could be even something much simpler, from a frontend UI perspective, I remember that CorelDraw offers a choice of interfaces for their software, so if you were more comfortable with Illustrator you could have the UI mimic this layout etc.
If Photoshop went down this route and included some specialty plug-ins they could defer some of the backlash, but from what I have read so far they haven't mentioned any alternatives or integration information.
What do you guys think of all of this? It would be great to hear back from some dedicated Fireworks users on this. Tell us what you think Adobe should do? Would you like to see Fireworks become open source?