Monday, June 2, 2008

Fireworks CS3 - Multiple Pages

The feature seems to me as a great boon to designers. Adobe has been marketing Fireworks as a web prototyping tool. I completely agree with them and also would like designers in other fields like application UI prototyping/designing, mobile application designing explore this gem of a tool which is a good fit for them.

From my personal experience I can assure you that the learning curve for this product from Adobe is very small. This is one of the hesitations I have found with designers who want to be productive with any new application they try their hands on.

Logically this feature have given the users another abstract level of document management where the entire website, application UI, mobile application prototype can be contained in a single PNG file. Existing users of Fireworks till its Macromedia version 8 can now think of a page as a container for independent set of layers and frames in separate pages.

Above you see a screenshot of the pages panel. As you can see this panel gives you a visual description of which page you are working on and also allows for operations like adding, deleting, duplicating pages.

Adding to the rescue of designers, if some things are common across all pages then an ordinary page can be made as a master page and all its contents would be attached to all the rest of the pages. Designers can see this in their layers panel, master page layer and its contents getting appended at the bottom.

But if some content in a page has to be shared across only certain pages, then the top most parent layer can be shared across only those pages. This layer sharing option across pages will be visible to users in the layers panel menu.

No comments: