Pixelthing.

The upshot is – bollocks, it’s a stupid question.

Firstly, Fireworks is more comparible in workflow to Illustrator than Photoshop. I go to a FireWorks file and click on the object I want (whether it’s vector, bitmap or text), spin it, resize it, colour it and add effects (all without destructive editing) without once having to think about what damned layer I left it on. That’s not to say I’d transfer to Illustrator CS4 either, it’s just not appropriate for outputting to screen res. When I zoom in 200%, I want to see pixels, dammit.

Secondly, this is 2009, and paper media is losing money hand over fist. Why the hell should a web professional be choosing the “save for web” option in a print design tool? Shouldn’t print designers be choosing “save for print” in a web design tool?

Thirdly, I find the output from Fireworks is consistently smaller, crisper and less compressed looking than from Photoshop’s “save for web” option. It’s the one thing that Fireworks can quantifiably claim to have over any other package. Stuff your colour profiles and gamma correction, it just looks better and comes out smaller.

Lastly, Macromedia and then Adobe have royally squandered the legacy of Fireworks, each version becoming more bloated and slower with more useless palettes, when basic font menus are broken, type anti-aliasing is not a patch on other Adobe products and even something basic like the saturation slider is frankly rubbish. If someone like Pixelmator added a FW/PNG importer and decent vector/slicing/compression tools, I’d jump on it.

Until then, you’ll have to take Fireworks from my cold dead mouse hand, nothing else fulfils that true test of any tool – that it becomes essentially invisible so you don’t think of the tool, but of the work it produces.

Most of the web staff in my office think I’m weird for using Fireworks. I think they’ve got too much time on their hands to even consider using photoshop with it’s print layout bias, arcane layer manipulation and crap vector tools to do what is essentially an object manipulation task like rapid web prototyping and outputting sharp, small graphics.

PS, I love Potato-shop, there’s no other image editor like it. But to design and output the bulk of sliced and diced web site graphics? Give me a break…