Macromedia Fireworks MX2004 RIP I still <3 you

It puts a smile on my face every time I use this program. I don't recommend anyone learn it, use it, or even take the time to read this article :D. This program is old. It's from 2004, but it doesn't surprise me at all that it still runs on all of my machines (win7, win10). It's that well made.

Can it still be used?

Legally speaking, you probably aren't allowed to use it unless you bought it back in the day. I've tagged it abandonware, but i don't think that is a label that stands up from a legal perspective. Adobe bought Macromedia many moons ago, so they own the product Fireworks, even though they later mothballed it. Lot's of the spirit of Fireworks live on in Adobe XD. And yet it doesn't. XD is a prototyping tool. Fireworks was a Swiss Army Knife.

Does it still work?

If you do want to try it, I guess you could, on windows at least. A google search for "macromedia fireworks mx2004" currently throws up everything you need. It lived in an era just before online activation became popular. So all you need is the installer and the serial. The installer is/was available here and weighs in at 25.96mb. The serials are currently live on Adobe's website and..

this code:
FWD700-59515-38218-96725

should get you in.

What was it supposed to be?

Fireworks was a unique blend of

• 50% vector graphics editor (think pen tool, combining paths, gradient fills etc)
• 30% raster editor. cut, crop, paste, resize, levels, saturation, excellent transparency support, excellent export preview and image compression, symbols (predated smart objects), batch converter, photoshop plugin support. it goes on.
• 5% GIF editor/animation tool
• 15% HTML webpage builder with behaviours such as swap image contents on rollover. This was done with slices and hotspots. You could load a flat visual design and block it out into slices Some of those slices you could say should be HTML and not images at all. Then you could export the whole thing as a HTML file for further editing in Dreamweaver. The slices would be exported as HTML tables to dimension the images covered by the slices. This is the most dated side of the software, and is mostly obsolete even if the remaining 85% isn't. However you can still use it today to make a 600px HTML email in 1 minute, in a pinch.

Why is it still good now?

I guess for me I would say speed. It opens in a couple of seconds and is ready to produce vector graphics, and it has enough raster (jpg, gif, png) editing in it that I wouldn't need anything else for most tasks.

If I tried to explain in words everything I use it for, it would take a long time and i wouldn't do it justice. Instead I am going to make a series of tutorials to show how it can still do a job today.

I would like to demonstrate some of these

• you can use it to make beatiful SVGs, albeit with one layer of conversion post save. I think it's worth it to be able to use the slick workspace and tools I can't live without
• I can edit my jpgs and raster images, save and exit, before photoshop has finished opening
• Because of it's age, image compression was an important feature. The app still shows you how many seconds your current export settings will take to download on a 56k dial up modem :D. Not surprisingly, Fireworks is the bees knees for optimising raster graphics for the web.
• It was extensible. In the creaky old recesses of the web, there are still extensions for it to get it to do more. The extensions were essentially written in Javascript. I have the guide to extending fireworks available.
• Like photoshop it can batch convert. Anything you can do to one image, you can save as a command and run on a whole folder of images. With intelligent file renaming.

That will serve as a reminder to me to make the tutorials. A massive fuss was kicked up when Adobe adandonned Fireworks. Many customers left for Sketch or other apps. Some customers vowed to boycott Adobe indefinitely. It's a shame but maybe all popular software is doomed to become massive, slow and bloated, trying to be all things to all men. Death by feature requests. Fireworks MX2004 will continue to be useful to me for a while longer yet I suspect.

Downloads

• The manual in pdf - download
• The guide to extending - download