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.

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.

JavaScript Engine in Fireworks

Adobe Fireworks has had a scripting engine built into it since a long time. This is similar to other Macromedia family application like Flash.

The scripting interface to the application is a great way in enhancing the product to ones own suitability. Users have created numerous scripts which prevents them from doing the same operations again and again.

After you do an operation on the canvas, copy that step from the ‘History’ panel and paste it in a text editor. You will be able to see the JavaScript that is equivalent of the operation just performed. Just to let you know things like drag and drop from the panels to canvas is not scriptable and does not generate history step.

Also some steps in the history have a cross mark applied to it indicating that the step cannot be done as a script operation.

The following link will take you to Fireworks Exchange where users have uploaded their scripts which can be helpful to other designers who are not very conversant with the scripting skills and yet yearn for such functionalities.

Apart from the JavaScript support, the application also supports Action Script 2 events. This is a great feature where power users can create custom panels. Some examples of the custom panels in Fireworks are ‘Color Palette’, ‘Symbol Properties’ and many more in the ship version of the product. Apart from them the panels under Commands menu are all Flash panels which communicate with Fireworks.