Rating: 
Summary: Not very impressive given the price
Review: I was a little puzzled after seeing so many rave reviews... to immediately find a glaring bug when I started the tutorials for this product. Incredibly, when entering text into the main document window or the button editor, the text selection box does not align with the text! This makes it nearly impossible to select text from among other objects in the page. Looking at the Macromedia online "Tech Support" page I found not help for this problem, but a catalog of HUNDREDS of other bugs. Maybe this is a great program for Mac users, but PC users beware. Obviously this is just a slip-shod porting effort from an original Mac title in an attempt to move into a customer base that isn't shrinking. A bit of advice: before buying ANY software, look at the producer's web page to get some idea of what kind of support you can get if you have a problem, and see how many known bugs have been reported. This program seems to have many powerful features, but that doesn't help much when the ones you use most don't work correctly. I guess I should stick with the try-before-you-buy approach.
Rating: 
Summary: An amazing product...
Review: Macromedia has outdone themselves with this product. Creating rollovers, especially, is now a painless and really cool "drag and drop" process. This even applies to creating popup-menus. You can create popup menus on the first day you use this product. They have included the entire Java source code to do these. Be warned though: This is a big Java file, 25k or so. I don't know enough about JavaScript to know whether the entire file is included in your web pages with popup menus, but if it is, this will add a huge burden on each page (maybe it's a server-side function? I just don't know).With the addition of selective JPEG compression, the need for Photoshop or other image-editing tools is on the wane. The other really cool thing is the roundtrip to DreamWeaver (4 or UltraDev 4) is now VERY SEAMLESS. I couldn't believe how great this feature worked. There are many, many other features that are either upgraded, added, or otherwise reorganized to make more sense. You will love it.
Rating:
Summary: An amazing product...
Review: Macromedia has outdone themselves with this product. Creating rollovers, especially, is now a painless and really cool "drag and drop" process. This even applies to creating popup-menus. You can create popup menus on the first day you use this product. They have included the entire Java source code to do these. Be warned though: This is a big Java file, 25k or so. I don't know enough about JavaScript to know whether the entire file is included in your web pages with popup menus, but if it is, this will add a huge burden on each page (maybe it's a server-side function? I just don't know). With the addition of selective JPEG compression, the need for Photoshop or other image-editing tools is on the wane. The other really cool thing is the roundtrip to DreamWeaver (4 or UltraDev 4) is now VERY SEAMLESS. I couldn't believe how great this feature worked. There are many, many other features that are either upgraded, added, or otherwise reorganized to make more sense. You will love it.
Rating: 
Summary: Cookie cutter
Review: This is a big disappointment, because its exactly like competing products out there like Paint Shop Pro 7.0 and the Adobe Photo Shop. Same fuctions, same filters, effects and layer function. However this software is much cheaper than Adobe Photo Shop so that might be a good thing. The only useful function I have found that sets Fireworks apart from competing products is its integration into Macromedia Dreamweaver (an HTML editor). With such great innovations as a very easy batch editor, that lets you select whole directory and edit the size, the brightness, and file type of the output images. Very useful for people with picture websites.
Rating:
Summary: Phenomenal
Review: Truly an excellent piece of brainpower. Macromedia is king. Since Adobe's bugged Illustrator, crappy version of LiveMotion, and worthless Photoshop updates are withering, expect Macromedia to have an almost monopoly-like view on all of it's great products.
Rating: 
Summary: These Fireworks Got Wet!
Review: When I heard what this program could do to energize my web site I was excited. However, the developers of Fireworks slighted the most important component of good software--help files & tutorials. The documentation is full of errors & ommisions. The help files are so archaic that they are useless and the user interface is not intuitive. Fireworks 4.0 by Macromedia may well have incredible capabilities but they are of no use if the user can't figure them out. The term "fireworks" conjures thoughts of a big bang in a small package. But we all know what good a wet firecracker is. In my opinion this box of fireworks has water damage.
Rating:
Summary: I love my Fireworks
Review: Yes, you'll need a book for it, but it really is an amazing thing. I use it daily in my design work.
| 
