Shimoda's dashboard

Well, what I meant was not literally hiding the layers below (as in not seeing them), but rather don't take them on account when exporting the slice. I can see how exporting objects or groups can be useful too, but think about the following fairly common situation as an example, albeit not being the most relevan case scenario: you have a background pattern and on top of it a smaller rectangle with a gradient that fades into the background, which takes the whole width of the document and 100px height. You'd want to export just a 1px slice of that gradient rectangle, fading into transparent and repeat it with css.

Quite frequently exporting a single layer/element/group will cut it (pun intended ;), but 1px slices are fairly common too, for example. – Shimoda, on October 11, 2009 15:24

The latest builds have been a *huge* improvement, don't get me wrong at all; I *really* appreciate this effort ;)

What I meant to say is that there's nothing like using an agile app. Any new feature added should not make the app sluggish (objects lag behind the cursor and so on) because that's the path to Fireworks' current state, and you get to the point where the whole app is unusable and so are those new features.

I can do with a smaller feature set if the app *feels* great. – Shimoda, on October 08, 2009 11:43

Like InDesign or Keynote do, right? Fireworks does more of sharing layers across pages. I agree that master pages are easier to manage. – Shimoda, on October 08, 2009 11:35

That could be nice, indeed. – Shimoda, on October 08, 2009 11:33

Hi, Pieter and everyone else! It's great that the conversation is heating up.

I agree with the need for a better slicing tool. Pixelmator has done a nice job when approaching this functionality. One thing I find myself doing a lot is hiding layers to export a slice with transparent background. You can't always use a matte to do this, and I think nowadays individual, transparent elements are the way to go rather than the square, flattened chunks of the old days. So an option to ignore layers below when exporting a slice would be a nice touch.

Pages has never cut it for me in Fireworks, maybe because of its overall misbehavior. I've had a much better experience with shared layers on OmniGraffle (the same concept, but works!), for example, or good ol' Master Pages a la InDesign (or the way OmniGraffle used to work). If done right, this would definitely a nice addition, but I've seen many implementations fail.

Better text support would be on my list too, with numerical tweaking like Tudor mentioned. I don't use guides/rulers/grid too much, so it's not a big deal in my workflow, but I can see why it's a common request.

The same goes with third-party image editors. I'm fine with doing my work somewhere else and importing a PNG. I'd rather go back and have some simple pixel-tools (nothing fancy: something to tweak some pixels here and there or cropping an image), but again it's nothing I would prioritize. What I would like to see is a crispier, hard pixel preview when zooming, to be able to really nail fine-adjustments.

Smart Objects would be a nice addition, but definitely not at the top of my wishlist.

Recapping a little... fast, smooth performance and functionality is number one on my list by far; then a better slicing tool, then pages.

Yay!

I've been giving it a quick test and the first impressions are good :)
I'll throw some more layers and objects at it and I'll get back with my experience.

Thanks, Pieter.

...and the Mann on the subject:
http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/1991....

Essentially, documents of around 1000x1500 and 40 or 50 layers should be manageable. I've also noticed a single big element (a rectangle of that size with a gradient and transparency) is enough to make the app unstable. The slice tool could be improved, but it's usable right now.

Fixing these things would be a great step in the direction we're talking about here.

Thanks again for taking all this into consideration!

It would definitely be cool to see that!

Coversutra has a similar function for iTunes (outside spotlight) which might be inspiring:

Hi, Pieter and thanks for dropping by and taking the time to answer back.

I've been following DrawIt for a long time now, before the vector-only focus and all, and I think it has a great, great potential.

Maybe big documents is not what it was intended for in the beginning, but I hope you can also see the proverbial void in the Mac community for such a product, as exemplified in these posts (http://nathanpitman.com/567/an-open-l...) and the follow-up (http://nathanpitman.com/589/still-no-...), another initiative of mine on Get Satisfaction (http://getsatisfaction.com/panic/topi...) and quite simply in the real-life community of professionals.

The truth is there is no real killer app for web design; Fireworks is the closest it gets but it's so bloated and slow that is a royal pain to use, plus 80% of the features are irrelevant. You really have an opportunity to fill that gap much like Pixelmator is luring Photoshop users; DrawIt is a really, really good starting point in the right direction (except for these performance issues ;)

So please, take a moment to consider all this when thinking about the future of DrawIt. I'll be glad to help you in any way I can if any of this makes sense to you.

I've tried a beta which offers support for Snow Leopard, but didn't work very well :(

Well... It's been 10 months since I started this thread and all I can say is I'm even more desperate than then. Fireworks CS4 sucks even more than CS3, and many Mac developers are turning to the iPhone platform and discontinuing development on independent vector or bitmap apps.

During all this time, I have found I'm not alone at all. This post (http://nathanpitman.com/journal/567/a...) shows not only great frustration on the community, but also many people thinking the same way about Panic, and maybe Macrabbit, being the only ones able to achieve the task.

So... I really hope you guys are actually considering the idea ;)

And here's the exception dump:

NSRangeException  -  *** -[NSCFString characterAtIndex:]: Range or index out of bounds


NSExceptionHandlerExceptionRaiser (in ExceptionHandling) + 185

objc_exception_throw (in libobjc.A.dylib) + 40

+[NSException raise:format:arguments:] (in CoreFoundation) + 155

+[NSException raise:format:] (in CoreFoundation) + 58

-[NSCFString characterAtIndex:] (in Foundation) + 115

myKeyDownCGEventCallback (in Tabster) + 190

processEventTapData (in CoreGraphics) + 851

_CGXPostEventTapData (in CoreGraphics) + 195

_XPostEventTapData (in CoreGraphics) + 206

CGXEventTap_server (in CoreGraphics) + 117

eventTapMessageHandler (in CoreGraphics) + 31

__CFMachPortPerform (in CoreFoundation) + 117

CFRunLoopRunSpecific (in CoreFoundation) + 3896

CFRunLoopRunInMode (in CoreFoundation) + 88

RunCurrentEventLoopInMode (in HIToolbox) + 283

ReceiveNextEventCommon (in HIToolbox) + 374

BlockUntilNextEventMatchingListInMode (in HIToolbox) + 106

_DPSNextEvent (in AppKit) + 657

-[NSApplication nextEventMatchingMask:untilDate:inMode:dequeue:] (in AppKit) + 128

-[NSApplication run] (in AppKit) + 795

NSApplicationMain (in AppKit) + 574

_start (in Coda) + 216

start (in Coda) + 41

0x2