Blog Moved!

Hi all,

Thank you for being a patient reader for all the posts I have accumulated in the past.
I am now moving this blog to a newer address http://blogs.adobe.com/sarthaksinghal

Let us all begin this new innings.

Thanks
Sarthak Singhal

Thank you all the creative professional attendees

The Fireworks event was a huge success which happened at Adobe Campus in Bangalore on July 12, 2008.

Despite being a Saturday designers from the top companies had come over to share their experience and learn more about the Fireworks product and its features.

The audience count was more than 40 and they had a great time. The labs session was also quite appreciated amongst the designers who got a personalized assistance from the Fireworks engineering team as to how the features work and helps increase their productivity.

Once again, thank you to all the people who had come over to make the event a huge success.

Adobe event in Bangalore for designers and Fireworks users.

Greetings Creative Professionals...

We at Adobe, welcome you to the showcase of Adobe Fireworks CS4 public Beta.

Sessions	Time	Duration
Welcome By Engineering Manager, Fireworks	10:00 -10:15	15 min
Keynote By Product Management, Fireworks	10:15 – 10:30	15 min
General Session Wire framing, prototyping and designing using Fireworks	10:30 -11:30	1 hr
Q & A	11:30 – 11:45	15 min
Tea meeting	11:45 – 12:00	15 min
Fireworks CS4 Beta Demo By Adobe Experience Designers	12:00 – 13:00	1 hr
Q & A	13:00 – 13:15	15 min
Hands on session with Fireworks CS4 Beta (This session can be extended post lunch based on your demand)	13:15 – 14:00	45 min
Networking lunch	14:00

Kindly, forward this invite to your designer friends who might be interested in this event.

Please send a mail to "fwcs4bta@adobe.com" to confirm your participation.

Thanking you,
Adobe Fireworks Team
Bangalore

Fireworks CS4 Beta - Live Gradients

Gradients are an integral part of every design application. I find anything designer has some degree of gradient applied to it. It may vary from a subtle gradient to one which is clearly distinguishable.

Fireworks had this tool from long back but had a workflow limitation where the gradient was not live. In other words when the gradient handles were moved around they did not reflect the changes on canvas until the mouse click was released.

Fireworks CS4 beta version just hit the nail on its head and solved this problem. Somehow now I feel that this is was a big limitation in Fireworks CS3 when I have got so much used to the live gradient present in the beta version.

In the above image a radial gradient has been applied to a vector object. It consists of 3 user defined operations.

1. The circular head of the gradient handle moves around the dark yellow circle in the gradient.

2. The rectangular end of the gradient increases the radius of circle.

3. When the cursor is placed in the line, it changes to rotational icon which can change the direction of gradient.

All the above 3 mentioned customizable options in a gradient are live now in Fireworks CS4 beta. In the previous version of Fireworks releases, the mouse click had to be released to see the change in gradient effect. There is a small performance hit on some occasions but I can easily survive with it.

Fireworks CS4 Beta - 9 Slice scaling Tool

As I mentioned in the earlier posts during CS3 time, this was one of the requests which was high on my list. In Fireworks CS4, my wish has been granted.

This request implementation will help out innumerable designer when doing any sort of design work involving scaling. The tool will be great to all the other designers who have got addicted to the intelligent 9 Slice scaling added in CS3 version of Fireworks.

My request was to remove the limitation of converting an object to symbol to apply 9 slice scaling settings to it.

Now, designers need not create a symbol out of the existing object to apply 9 slice guides to it. The tool is accessible via scaling tools options as shown below.

The 9 slice scaling tool cannot be applied to a symbol.

The 9 slice guides are available on a per object per session basis. The guides do not remember the settings. Hence when the object looses selection the guide settings are also lost. The next time 9 slice scaling is done, the guides will appear at the default location.

Fireworks CS4 beta - Style Improvements

1. It will list all the styles which are used in the current document.
2. If there are any more documents in the current Fireworks CS4 beta session, all the documents will be listed in the drop down menu. The user can access the style library used in that document as well.
3. This will load the stl file in the current session of Fireworks. It will be added to the drop down menu in panel and will be visible for all documents in that Fireworks session only.
4. When the mouse is hovered on a style in the styles panel, the style name will be reflected in this region.
5. This will load the contents of the stl file in the "Current Document" drop down option in styles panel and will be available only for the current document.
6. Through this option the stl file will be loaded and copied it in the user settings location. The stl library file imported will be available across multiple documents and multiple sessions of Fireworks.
7. A user can create custom stl library files. This option will save the styles in ‘Current Document’ as a stl library file.

The following options are available in the Property Inspector panel of Fireworks.

8. This will delete the style which is mentioned in the drop down menu.
9. This will break the link of the style on the current object. Any edits to this style will not be propagated to other objects which have the same style applied to it.
10. This option can be used when a user wants to revert back to the original style after it has been edited.
11. After a style has been applied to an object and the style is modified. Pressing this button will propagate the changes across all the objects where this style is applied.
12. This button is used to create a new style. Existing attributes of the selected object will be the attributes of the new style being created.

Other Workflow operations:

1. Alt + Drag will redefine the style in the "Current Document" field in Styles Panel.
2. All, used and unused styles are saved in the png file.
3. Deleting the Live Styles from Properties Inspector will delete it only from the current Document option. To delete it from the Library, use the panel delete option.
4. Copy a style and paste it into another document will paste the object and add the style associated with it in the Styles panel.
5. Copy Paste attributes will also paste the style in the styles panel.
6. When a Style is created from a group/autoshape, only the effects will be defined in the created style. The fill and stroke options are unchecked by default and hence they will not be picked up in the style. When the fill and stroke options are checked they will be picked up in the style created.
7. When you apply a style to a group/autoshape, the path attributes are NOT applied to all the sub-elements & only the effect is applied to the entire group.
8. When a style is redefined from a group/autoshape, only the effects are redefined. All the path attributes are ignored.
9. When an object with style name "Temp" is copy pasted into a new document which also has the style name "Temp", the new object pasted gets the + sign added to it.
10. Importing a png file which contains styles will pop up a dialog if the style in the current file and the file which is being imported has a clash in style names.

Fireworks CS4 Beta - Smart Guides

Aligning objects can be a real problem at times. Fireworks CS4 beta solves this problem common amongst designers by introducing the feature “Smart Guides”

This feature itself I believe can be a sole reason driving the upgrade to CS4 for many designers worldwide.

Whenever an object is brought in close proximity to any other object on the canvas, the guides become visible automatically which automatically to the closest pixel value.

The alignment happens to any kind of object, be it vector, bitmap, AutoShapes, groups or any other object. The alignments possible in respect to any other object are:

1. Horizontal top.
2. Horizontal bottom.
3. Vertical left.
4. Vertical right.
5. Center of object.
6. Center of canvas

The alignment happens by showing a dotted line which becomes visible in all the above cases of alignment.

If a user wants to hide the dynamic lines which get generated, they can do so by un-checking the option “Show Smart Guides”.

Fireworks CS4 Beta - Stronger PSD support

1. In CS4, when a psd file is opened/imported a dialog box will pop up from where the user can choose the way objects will be brought into Fireworks. The dialogs can be suppressed through this preference setting.
2. Image Layers refer to the bitmap objects of Photoshop. Either the bitmap objects can be brought into Fireworks with editable effects or the effects along with the object can be converted to a complete flat image using this preference setting.
3. The text preference setting can bring the text as editable or as a bitmap converted image.
4. Shape Layers refer to the vector objects in Photoshop.
• The “Editable path and effects” setting will bring the object as editable vectors. But this may changes the appearance.
• “Flattened bitmap images” preference setting will bring all the vector object and effects applied on them as a single bitmap image.
• The last preference option seem to bring the best of both, where the shape layers will converted to bitmap object but the effects applied on to it will be editable in Fireworks.
5. Fireworks has two sets of filters, one being its native set and the other one borrowed from Photoshop. Through this preference setting, when a psd file is imported/opened the user will have the option to map the effects contained in the psd file to either Fireworks native filters or to the Photoshop filters which are also present in Fireworks. Since the algorithm for same filter might differ, there may be slight difference in filter appearance also.
6. The appearance of clipping masks in psd files when brought into Fireworks as editable, changes quite a lot. This preference setting will solve this problem to a certain extent where the clipping masks and the base object will be converted to a single bitmap object maintaining the same appearance as seen in Photoshop.

Thus all the object types can now be controlled independently through this preference settings dialog. The tooltips for each of the preference is also quite self explanatory.

NOTE: The above preferences will be applied to the objects when user selects “Custom Settings From Preferences” option from the Import/Open dialog’s last drop down menu.

When a file is saved as a psd file from Fireworks, the user can control the individual object’s save type settings. Controlling the individual object type saving setting is possible after selecting “Custom” from the first drop down menu.

Other feature details

1. When a file is saved from Fireworks, the layers have the blend mode set to “Pass Through”. This will be helpful in some cases where the blend mode is set to Screen for layers in Fireworks.

2. When a mask has been created through Paste Inside option, it will be flattened when exported as a psd. This will maintain the appearance but the tradeoff is that the mask will be lost.

3. Content layer solid fills, all color spaces and bit depths and Color profiles in a PSD file will be converted to RGB 8 bit when opened/imported into Ignite.

4. When a psd file is opened, slices and guides are carried into Fireworks CS4.

Fireworks CS4 Beta - PDF Export

Adobe owns the PDF file format and has become the standard for document sharing across web.

With the introduction of Pages feature in Fireworks CS3, the ability of exporting the Fireworks png file as a pdf file became a next feature for this release. Also this seemed to be quite beneficial to any product where a designer might not be actual presenter to client. Or if the client interaction is only through mails.

This functionality of exporting all the pages of fireworks png file as different pages of a pdf document is a great help to people just mentioned above. The export to PDF functionality can be accessed via File ->Export and using the option as shown below.

Along with the format availability, there are multiple customizations which are also possible so that how the output pdf file will appear and behave. The following dialog can be accessed via the Options button which becomes visible after selecting the “Adobe PDF (*.pdf)” format.

After the pdf file has been generated, it can be viewed automatically in a pdf reader if the user checks the option of “View PDF after Export”.

Fireworks CS4 Beta - States panel improvements

Formerly Frames panel

1. This icon in the state indicates that there are some objects within it but none of them is selected.
2. This icon indicates that the state has no object contained within it.
3. This icon indicates the presence of selected object in this state.

Other major changes:

1. Contextual menu has been added to the panel similar to Pages and Layers panel.
2. When the user in a condition similar to point 3 as above, dragging the darkened circle will move the selected object from the current frame to the frame where the circle is dropped into.