Why do you Despise Fireworks?
Ever since Adobe announced the acquisition of Macromedia, everybody is trying to figure out what will be the fate of the products we use regularly. I think I’ve read it all, and although it would make sense to slash out Freehand (the product has been stagnant for so long, in effect favoring Illustrator), I don’t understand why some neglect Fireworks importance.
Fireworks, with all its quirks, is better than ImageReady, period. Comparing Fireworks to Photoshop makes no sense, they have different missions. Although it’s been very long since I used Fireworks for creating layouts and slicing graphics for web pages, it is is still my weapon of choice for editing and optimizing (not retouching) photographs, and creating other visuals (bitmaps) for my Flash applications. I even use it to create emoticons for my chats over MSN Messenger… that’s another story.
Anyway, as a user of Fireworks since version 2, I don’t think it deserves to be dropped, or have its guts spilled around. If anything, it should be used to make a better ImageReady or replace it completely, if at all possible.