Review By: Bookie
Product Reviewed: Fireworks MX



Alas, my dreams have come to reality, and Fireworks MX has arrived! Along with a fancy new logo for the MX series, comes a new look, and new tools. I believe fireworks MX was a great improvement, as it added several new features and a great amount rearrangements to improve usability. But like any software, it has its bad areas too, though I hate to admit it... there are some.

I'm not one to hold off the bad news, so I'll just give it to you straight.. When you open up Fireworks MX (if your anything like me) you will be shocked and overwhelmed with happiness to see they have added new tools including smudge, blur, burn, dodge, and sharpen. Pretty good eh? No. I am very dissapointed in the blur and smudge tool, as the blur tool leaves an unwanted glow around what you are bluring, you would be better off using the blur in the effect menu. The you can hardly smudge vector objects on medium pressures, and when the pressure goes higher than a medium level it doesn't fade off.

That is about all the bad news I could find in Fireworks, the only other think I noticed is the new "property bar" sometimes takes up alot of space, reducing your workspace. Don't get me wring, the property bar was a great addition, you now no longer need 20 dockers open to build you graphics, this bar will handle them all. It is easily minimized in a single click for convinience. Along with the docker arrangment is the new organization of the toolbar. Each area has a header to let you know which tools are for vector objects and which are for bitmap. Bitmap editing tools have also been added and enhanced to allow you to do more with bitmap images. One of my favorite improvements had to be on the gradients. Finally Fireworks MX has added the option to control the opacity of your gradients which helps a TON for different effects. The new "Align" docker allows you control your anchors on your vecotr object, and align object with the canvas. Those of you using photoshop will be glad to know that Fireworks MX can now open, edit, and save photoshop (.psd) files while retaining layers and not losing any quality. Along with all of these great additions came some new commands, a few are fade image and twist and fade. These commands are a big time saver for great effects. Speaking of time savers you can now save styles (Fills, strokes, effects), and apply them to other objects simply by clicking the style in the docker. Finally, one of the bigger changes is the advanced stroke options. Fireworks MX now allows you to create your own strokes, and edit the presets, the system is quite advanced ad will allow you to create a wide variety of strokes.

Overall, I LOVED Fireworks MX compared to Fireworks 4. Sure the new toold could have used some more works, but I guess some is better than none. All of the new features allow more advanced graphics in a quicker time span. So I have concluded that Fireworks recieves a rating of 2 thumbs up, 4.5/5 stars, 9/10, and a BLAM!.