David Emery Online

Behind the scenes of Fireworks CS4's UI

27 May 2008

Several months ago, somewhere deep within Adobe’s headquarters.

BILL: Morning Frank, we’ve got a bit of a problem with Fireworks’ UI.

FRANK: Fireworks? I thought we canned that?

BILL: Nope, for some reason we’ve decided to keep on at it – something about not wanting to add any more features for Photoshop for a while while we sort out this whole re-write for Cocoa rubbish…

FRANK: Oh yeah, I heard about that. So what’s the problem?

BILL: Well, we’ve just taken a look at what Apple have done with the UI in 10.5, and we’ve all come to the decision that we’re going to need to darken down the UI a bit.

FRANK: Makes sense – it was all looking a bit clunky anyway what with all those 10.0-style square buttons all over the place…

BILL: …oh no, we’re not going to get rid of them.

FRANK: Oh.

BILL: No, we’re just going to add some more custom UI stuff to make it look all up-to-date and Leopard-y.

FRANK: Great, sounds good. Are we going to finally move to using a standard toolbar, maybe even some of those nifty HUD-style floating palettes that Aperture uses?

BILL: Err, ‘fraid not. We were kind of thinking that we might have a go at using some of the UI ideas we’ve been messing around with in Lightroom and mix in some 10.5 goodness.

FRANK: Ooookkay… sounds a little… odd.

BILL: No no, it’s going to be cool. So anyway, we have this little problem.

FRANK: Yep?

BILL: We’re going to have this really cool titlebar on the window…

FRANK: …the document window?

BILL: Oh no – the window, we’re just having one that has all the palettes and documents and stuff in, with this nifty tab system.

FRANK: Shouldn’t we at least have a preference so that you can use normal windows like every other app?

BILL: Hmm, I guess – I’ll look into it. Anyway, in our titlebar we’re going to put little buttons for the hand and magnify tools on the right hand side…

FRANK: Sorry, what? In the window titlebar? Won’t they be really small?

BILL: No no – we’ve made it a bit bigger to fit. Anyway, that’s the problem – we’ve got all this space on the right; which do you think would be better – a drop down menu that toggles between whether the palettes are in icon mode or not, or a big Fireworks logo?

FRANK: Does the Fireworks logo do anything?

BILL: Nah – the branding guys just liked the idea of it.

FRANK: Well that would be a bit pointless then, wouldn’t it? Surely we could put something more useful there – maybe a toolbar toggle button like most windows hav…

BILL: …yeah, you’re right – the logo would just be ridiculous! We’ll put it over on the left instead, next to our custom window widgets – have you seen them? They look great – all nice and dark!

FRANK: …

BILL: Anyway, thanks for your time Frank.

FRANK: Don’t mention it.