Fireworks CS4 Beta - Pages panel Improvements

1. Master Page can be collapsed now. The thumbnail will be hidden in this mode for the master page. Thumbnails for other pages will not be affected by this action. Clicking on the highlighted arrow icon in the panel will perform the action.
2. When a page gets duplicated from the panel menu or the shortcut icon in the panel, the duplicated page will be placed right below the original page. Earlier in CS3 the duplicated page used to get added as the last page. Also the naming convention will quickly allow the user to find out the origin of duplicated page.
3. Pages panel now support the contextual menu within it. The menu can be accessed by right clicking on any page. It will not be functional from the blank area in the panel. This menu is same as the panel menu.
4. This gives a feedback to the user on the number of pages in the document. Just a glance at this place will give the information to the user.
5. This drop down menu is extremely helpful to users who operate on multiple pages and still would like to keep the panel small in width. Also the user gets information of the different pages present in the document. The master page is appended with an asterisk. This is similar to the drop down which was present in the Document Window.

Other major changes:

1. Pages panel now allow for multi-selection of pages by holding the Shift/Ctrl key.
2. Since multi-selection of pages is now possible, multiple pages can be deleted and duplicated.
3. When operations are performed with multiple selected pages, the history steps step generated is single. But the JavaScript behind it has multiple commands under a single step referring to all the pages.
4. The Pages panel now has Auto numbering in the panel visible. This auto number is not part of the actual page name. It gets updated when the pages are re-ordered.
5. Any new page added or duplicated gets added just below the currently selected page.
6. When pages are dragged for re-ordering, deleting or duplicating the icon changes to a grabber icon.
7. Fireworks CS3 allowed users to create page names with special characters in it. A restriction has been placed for it. (Special Character ex: / : \ < > | ? * “)

A major limitation of CS3 was that the user could not create same Layer name across different pages. In CS4, unique Layers naming constraint is not present anymore where users can have the same layer name across any page.

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.