What’s New in Fireworks CS6?
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What’s New in Fireworks CS6?

on May 7th 2012 with 33 comments
Tutorial Details
  • Topic: Adobe Fireworks CS6
  • Difficulty: Beginner
  • Screencast duration: 15 mins

As you’ll probably know, I just love Adobe Fireworks; it’s my favorite tool for creating images in a multi-screen environment. Thanks to the release of Fireworks CS6 my love affair has blossomed even further, so over the next few days we’re going to look at some of the reasons why.

Color

One new feature in Fireworks CS6 is the color picker. It single handedly eliminates the risk of selecting the wrong color and allows easy color integration with your favorite code editor.

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Panels

There have been some significant changes to the panels in Fireworks – and boy, oh boy are they neat..

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Templates and Common Library

We’ll conclude our general overview of what’s new in Fireworks CS6 by taking a look at the beefed-up templates selection and a common library which will knock your socks off.

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Tom is a professor of Interactive Multimedia through the Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning’s School of Media Studies. Like all faculty in the program, Tom believes his students deserve to be taught by instructors who are regarded as experts in their field and whose knowledge of their subject is current with industry best practice.  

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  • Jesus Bejarano

    Esta excelente el resumen , no puedo esperar a probar fireworks cs6

  • http://maomuffy.com Mfawa Alfred Onen

    Nice effort on this subject matter…I will be following this series.

  • Matthias

    I’m impressed with FW CS6!
    Nice to see FW resources! Keep it going, guys! ;)

    Cheers

  • dixhuit

    Is that it?

    You say “subtle”, I say “very disappointing”.

    I’m a long time FW user too and I have to say, this update is depressing. Most of what was covered in the 3 videos above is achievable in CS5 with a little extra effort. I guess I can still hope that they fixed a few of my least favourite CS5 bugs – fingers crossed.

    Thanks for taking the time to make the videos and run through your favourite bits – I’m glad you’re pleased with it. I’m just hoping that’s not the extent of the ‘changes’ in FW CS6 because for me, that’s nowhere near enough effort from Adobe.

    • Matthias

      dixhuit,

      See the whole list of new features and enhacements for FW CS6 here:
      http://launch.fwpolice.com

      ;)

      • dixhuit

        Yeah, I’ve seen the list of new features but I still don’t think it’s up to much. Sure they’re all welcome additions and changes but surely you can’t all be satisfied with the total effort from Adobe here (especially when compared to the new features lists for some of the other CS6 products)?

        Put it this way: The one thing that REALLY needed sorting out in FW (that the community seemed pretty much completely agreed on) was the text rendering. I don’t see that text rendering has been improved on any new features list anywhere.

        Adobe should be listening to Project Meteor, there’s some sensible suggestions going on over there: http://projectmeteor.org

      • dixhuit

        Just downloaded the trial. The full list of changes is available via the help:

        http://helpx.adobe.com/content/help/en/fireworks/using/whats-new-cs6.html

        I can’t see how to adjust the UI to the darker version like they’ve done for Photoshop CS6. Or did FW not get this feature either? You’d think they’d roll that out across all CS6 products?

        • Matthias

          Unfortunally no… only PS and Illustrator has the dark UI option.

          On the other hand, just found this nice little feature…
          http://chunwui.posterous.com/how-to-enable-auto-save-in-fireworks-cs6

          • dixhuit

            Well then this update sucks even more than I thought.

            Come on Adobe – pull yer finger out!

        • http://rockin.com jackie

          this isn’t that great.

    • Tom Green
      Author

      Stay tuned. More to come.

    • Aaron

      Should be called Fireworks CS 5.6. The antiquated interface, untouched text tools, and 32-bit situation amongst other glaring omissions in this “update” are typical Adobe and not befitting of a new version name.

  • Pingback: What’s New in Fireworks CS6? | Shadowtek Hosting and Design Solutions

  • http://eddie-moore.com Ed Moore

    My absolute favourite feature on Fireworks CS6 is the ability to directly copy the CSS styles of something you have created and paste then into your CSS file. Plus it has the vendor prefixes for all the browsers.

    • Matt

      I agree. I would also say that the layers thing for the symbols is just weird. when I start working with this it might be better to understand but you can already edit layers of an item in an object/symbol inside a document in FW CS5.

      I would say that the styles thing is also disappointing. Almost the same as before except they are globally available – which isnt that great anyway – if you use fireworks all the time you could end up with a heck of a lot of styles in this thing.

      For the real FW nerds I think the majority would be disappointed with this release.

    • http://www.reinegger.net Andre Reinegger

      For me the CSS-Properties panel is the best feature in the whole Master Collection of CS6.
      You have precise CSS(3) properties (with all it’s browser prefixes) which can be easily brought into your CSS styles file by copy and pasting from Fireworks.

      Too bad that Adobe doesn’t promote it that well!

  • webdesigndev

    I feel like deaf, not able to hear a single word what he is speaking about huh!

    • http://www.snaptin.com Ian Yates

      No problems through my speakers – you think the volume is too low?

      • http://www.seowisedesigns.com/ Ariel

        I just watched four videos about the new features of FW and I think the volume is just right,.. but I did hit the volume up for sure a little bit :)

      • webdesigndev

        Yes, the audio is too low to hear and To hear the voice i turned up the volume to full.

        • http://www.snaptin.com Ian Yates

          Okay, thanks guys – I’ll err on the side of caution with volume levels from now on :)

  • http://www.nivvon.com/ Web Design Bacau

    Our favorite thing is the CSS paramaters. We are using Fireworks to create websites from the very beginning and we consider that it is much better than Photoshop for Web Building.

    • me

      You cant be serious when you actually use Fireworks to create websites? That should be done by coding css, either with Dreamweaver og manually. To export bitmap graphics and a positioned layout and relay on Fireworks to “magically” render valid and clean code is nothing less than extreme. I cant support anyone that does that. Fireworks has always been a stupid toy that Macromedia left in a beta version, when Adobe bought it they just got stuck on the same level.

  • growing

    I’m actually really disappointed in the new fill and stroke color picker. I find it really difficult to change the color of a gradient to something specific (not one of the preset swatches), without having to use the color mixer, save a swatch to your presets, and then eyedrop one of the gradient’s colors.

    I’d much prefer the standard color mixer found in Photoshop, Illustrator, etc..

    • TorgIshere

      OH MY GOD! ^^^^^^ THIS ^^^^

      I’m dying over here right now wrestling with the color picker in FW. It’s absolutely horrible. I’m using the color palette to mix a color, 202, 202, 202 (RGB) and if I choose Stroke and pass the 202 values, i get a pink/purple… If I do the same for fill.. I get a neutral grey. *Fist Wall* – I’m giving FW an honest chance here… Smashing Magazine suggested it’s use for mocks and style guide works flows and what not, but I have to say, this is one of the worst programs I’ve ever used. It feels like it has hardly progressed since MacroMedia Studio MX.

      Fireworks needs to either go away, or step up to the plate. Between missing features, bloated panels, horrible color selection and mixing, missing key commands (hot keys), retarded grouping interactions and layers panel, imprecise features (looking at you rounded corner rectangle), and bizarre time consuming interactions, I really dont want to ever use FW for a professional project. It’s utter garbage compared to illustrator.

  • Rusty

    You can copy the CS6 common library and templates into your CS5 installation. Not sure how ethical it is, but still possible! http://blog.laneolson.ca/use-the-fireworks-cs6-common-library-and-templates-in-fireworks-cs5.html

  • Michael

    I’m also disappointed, it always feels like they make major improvements to their other suite products but only minor improvements to FW. I still cannot produce quality logo mockups with FWCS6 due to the poor text rendering. I keep getting complaints from my clients about the jagged edges. The anti-alias option has hardly no effect. We have complained about this way before CS4, and it’s better, but not even close the perfect vector lines in Illustrator, why? Come on Adobe don’t leave us hanging, FW is a great product for web designers, don’t abandon us. Or at least give us the heads up, that you just don’t have the resources or the motivation to keep this product up so we can start learning and working with something else.

    • http://www.themestyle.net Charlie

      I guess the answer to your problem is simple then.

      Use Illustrator or Photoshop :)

      • TorgIshere

        The should have stopped at Illustrator. Don’t make a logo in Photoshop or Fireworks. IMHO…

  • http://www.varloodesign.com Nate

    I’m having this issue where if you’re trying to set the fill using a color picker on something in the canvas, you end up with a slight variation every time you do it. You can sample and resample and slowly watch the color change darker and less saturated.

    Does anyone have any ideas as to why the new Fireworks CS6 color picker is so much different?

    I actually thought that was one of the many superior features to Photoshop for many years, but seems like it might be lost now…

  • sinewave

    WTF.

    Aren´t these minimal changes since CS5 / 5.5 A LITTLE FUCKING BIT OVERHYPED?

    Don´t know why I should pay money for this. This is not a new Version, these changes should be nothing more than patchtcontent.

    Shame on you, Adobe.

    • TorgIshere

      Agreed!

  • firecrash

    Fireworks sucks. CS6 crashed daily for me. New MBP 8GB RAM. I enabled autosave, luckily. I still hate it.

  • http://twitter.com/harryjones Harry Jones

    “Boy oh boy I love this feature”, “A common library to die for”

    How much did Adobe pay you to make these videos?!

    What we have here is a load of extra bloat which most designers will never use. Meanwhile there are endless stability bugs and core features missing (off the top of my head: still no gradients on strokes, still the Photoshop Live Effects panel only half-implemented).

    Yet we now get some grid templates and ability to set opacity on a stroke. Wow.