Comments on: Adobe Fireworks CS4 [OLD VERSION]

By: Gregory Milligan

Gregory Milligan — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 16:13:17 +0000

Review by Gregory Milligan for Adobe Fireworks CS4 [OLD VERSION] Rating: I have been using Fireworks CS4 (Win) for several weeks, mostly in prototyping and website design. I have experienced none of the buggines and instability others here describe. Usually, I am running 10 or 20 other apps in the background, including Photoshp CS4, Lightroom, Visio, Outlook, IE, Firefox, Remote Desktops, etc. I use it accross 4 monitors. I have had no problems - at all.

I am also testing a trial version Expression and SketchFlow. So far, at least for the wireframes and prototyping, I prefer Fireworks. It is powerful and allows me to leverage the tools and features I am used to working with across the Adobe product family. I still need more time with Expression Suite to make any final decisions, but my immediate knee jerk reaction is Fireworks is more intuative and powerful. I will probably end up using different applications for specific tasks. Fireworks is a great design tool.

By: L. Mylks

L. Mylks — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 16:12:04 +0000

Review by L. Mylks for Adobe Fireworks CS4 [OLD VERSION] Rating: wow! what a piece of garbage this software is and how amazingly bad, unhelpful, and time consuming Adobe's tech support staff respond to this product's problems - if they respond...

Wanna play with software that let's you truly know misery and frustration - buy this product...

Wanna make a working website or "rapidly design" something... try something else - I'm sorry I don't know what to use instead. Any suggestions?

Business people, be forewarned, do not buy Fireworks CS4 if you work with deadlines.

By: Kendall L. Vaughan

Kendall L. Vaughan — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 15:21:21 +0000

Review by Kendall L. Vaughan for Adobe Fireworks CS4 [OLD VERSION] Rating: This software isn't working for me at all. At first it was very temperamental and would only work some of the time. Recently I had to move everything to a new hard drive and Fireworks stopped working entirely. The fact that this software has been out for over a year and still won't even launch is unbelievable.

By: Adam M. Friedman

Adam M. Friedman — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 14:55:57 +0000

Review by Adam M. Friedman for Adobe Fireworks CS4 [OLD VERSION] Rating: Adobe Fireworks CS4 is one of most unstable pieces of junk I've ever had the torture of using. I used Fireworks 8 without a hitch for three years, and my company upgraded to CS4, and now the app crashes or freezes up constantly on a brand new HP Pentium 4 with 4GB RAM. Other programs work fine on this machine.

Fireworks CS4 is riddled with bugs. I might have a 500KB file open, and I'll try to add a filter, or move some text around, and boom -- Fireworks crashes. This occurs literally every 5-10 minutes, whether I have a few other programs open or not. I've gotten into the habit of saving the file over and over, after each and every change. A few times the program even crashed DURING the save process. When I re-opened the file, this last bit of work had vanished.

It is so shocking that a company can charge enterprise-level prices but not provide enterprise-level stability for its software.

FW CS4 is also a memory hog. When Fireworks sits idle with no files loaded, it takes up about 220MB of memory. In contrast, Photoshop CS4 only uses about 75MB. Why should FW need triple the memory? Either because it is three times more powerful than Photoshop, or, more likely, it is bloated beyond repair.

At this moment I have a single file open that contains five states with a canvas of 1200x2000, and perhaps 30MB of uncompressed image data, no serious filtering effects applied, and 20 text layers in total. Guess how much RAM that Windows Task Manager reports FW is using? Normally,

~400MB. Nearly half a GIG.

C'mon Adobe. Fix your software.