Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Fireworks CS4 Beta - Features

Adobe Fireworks CS3 released with a mega feature pack in the spring of 2007. The CS4 version is more about polishing those features to make them fit easily with the designers. This release focuses more on the usability issues of designers and also for the feature discoverability.

Apart from the polishing of existing features, there are some big requested features which have also been added in the CS4 release.

1. User Interface has gone a complete overhaul

2. Smart Guides are a real time saver while aligning objects on canvas.

3. Better Photoshop integration in this beta release.

4. PDF Export is now possible. All the pages in the png file now become pages of pdf file.

5. 9 Slice Scaling is available as a tool. No need to create a symbol to 9 slice scale the objects.

6. Live Styles Improvements- Designers have the flexibility of creating new styles,

7. Symbol In place Edit similar to the Flash work flow for components.

8. Live Gradients. Moving the handles of gradients makes the changes live on canvas.

9. Screenshot Tool is available on windows and works similar to Mac screenshot.

10. Frames is now renamed to ‘State’

11. Asynchronous saving for documents.

12. Flex Skinning

13. AIR Package creation

14. Text Engine has been re-architected.

15. Exporting the layout as CSS and Images.

16. Better support for Nested Symbols

17. New Path panel for vector based operations

18. Color Palette panel has a new look and extended the earlier functionality.

19. Usability changes to Pages, Layers and States panel. All these panels now have right click enabled in them.

20. Two new tools have been added ‘Arrow Line’ and ’Measure Tool’

Tune in to further posts where I try to explain some of the features mentioned above.

No comments: