Nomadtoons.com Blog

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Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Adobe Fireworks CS3 sucks.

I'm usually not one to rant about consumer goods, but as a graphic designer who uses Adobe products every single day for a living, I have to say that the latest version of Fireworks is flawed with numerous problems that while not huge, together cause me to lose untold amounts of time in productivity. I'll list just a few.

First of all, if you draw say a straight line with the line tool, you have the option to choose either a soft or hard line. It automatically draw a soft line. If you then change it to a hard line, more often than not, it will shift the line to a different location, usually one pixel up or down. Secondly, the program seems incapable of rendering rounded corners appropriately. If you use auto shape tool and draw a 3 pixel radius square, 50% of the time it'll butcher one of the corners. Often times I have to go in and manually draw the corners.

Other problem include resizing shapes and lines. If you have an auto shape- or any shape for that matter- and manually change the size using the W and H settings, if you have a square for example, the lines will suddenly become slightly crooked.

One highly annoying issue makes zero sense to me. If you create a symbol, resize the symbol in symbol edit mode and then go back to the main stage, the true size of the edited symbol is totally inaccurate which makes reusing symbols to create new components next to useless. Yet another problem with symbols is that if you edit the size of a symbol that has layers, the layers will suddenly become offset even if you use even increments.

Lastly, on numerous occasions including what happened just now is that if you've created a document then save it, sometimes shapes will shift and need to be re-edited later. This makes zero sense to me.

I've used this product for 6 months now and the level of frustration is appalling for a company that produces such stellar products like Flash and Photoshop. I hope that these bugs will be fixed in the future.