Sound too
good to be true? Well, admittedly, in some cases it is. Some
filters just don't work well as live effects and can have unpredictable
results. Sometimes a filter just doesn't look right, while other
times it might cause Fireworks to forget where your plugins
folder is, so you have to reload the folder and relaunch Fireworks.
Not to fear,
however. Fireworks keeps two pull-down menus for effects. There
are the regular, old, destructive filters and the live effects.
If you find a filter to be buggy as a live effect, you can simply
remove it from the Effects palette but still access it from
the filter menu (called Xtras in Fireworks). Basically it's
up to plugin developers to make their filters useable as live
effects. Many are already doing so.
Interactive
graphics
As I've said before, the strength of Fireworks is in its ability
to create graphics for the Web, and this applies to interactive
elements as well. Of course, the program has nowhere near the
interactive capabilities of Flash. But it can still get you
through a project with some pretty hefty tools.
For simple
animation, Fireworks can handle tweening for common transformations,
such as rotation and position. It can also be used to create
rollovers and can very easily generate slices of an image that
can be hyperlinked directly in Fireworks or in a Web page layout
program.
But, again,
version 4 goes even further with a complete, step by step wizard
for creating interactive pop-up menus, a feature that once again
brings it to the front of the interactive graphics pack. This
is so shockingly simple that you can't even imagine it. It would
actually take me significantly more time to type out an explanation
of how it works than it would to create a pop-up menu in Fireworks.
So I'll give it to you the quick way. All you have to do is
select an area of your image that will trigger the menu. Then
you just select Insert > Pop-up Menu and fill in the blanks.
It's really this easy.
Creating
pop-up menus in Fireworks 4 is just a matter of filling in a
few
blanks. Here I've created three main menu items (Tutorials,
Reviews and
Features). I've also created a submenu under Tutorials called
"Web
Design." Beneath this, I've placed two tertiary menus called
"Web Page
Layout" and "Web Graphics." It was all done with
a few drags and drops
and a few button pushes.
After you've
filled in your information for each menu item, you just move
on and select your formatting. You can use text or graphics,
with various options for each. Excellent implementation.
