Dreamweaver 8 Vs. Fireworks 8
In the early 1990's, website design tools were about as advanced as the flint and stone tools used by cavemen. Fortunately, Web developers today have many more Web design and development options to choose from. Dreamweaver 8 and Fireworks 8 are two complementary design tools for creating attractive and standards-compliant websites. These programs are easy to use, but powerful enough to meet the needs of professional designers. Adobe Systems Incorporated purchased Macromedia – the developer of Dreamweaver 8 and Fireworks 8 – in 2005.
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Dreamweaver 8 Overview
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Dreamweaver is a Web page design, development and deployment application. Dreamweaver lets you to work with raw HyperText Markup Language code or use the visual, preview mode that resembles a "What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get" word processor. Dreamweaver has built-in site management capabilities you can use to transfer your files to and from a Web server. You can create your own time-saving Web page templates or edit those included with the program. Dreamweaver 8 supports static or dynamic websites built using PHP -- PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor – and ColdFusion.
Fireworks 8 Overview
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Fireworks 8 is a software tool to create and edit images for the Web. Fireworks supports both bit-mapped and vector images. Fireworks is a not an expensive, full-featured, general purpose editor like Adobe Photoshop, but it can meet the needs of the website designer who might want to edit photos, create image maps or design website prototypes that will later be converted into working HTML or HyperText Markup Language pages. Fireworks 8 uses PNG or Portable Network Graphics as its default image file format. The PNG format preserves the quality of images while reducing their file size. Fireworks also works with TIFF, JPEG, GIF, PSD, SWF, PICT, BMP and WBMP file formats.
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Adobe Software Versions
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Dreamweaver 8 and Fireworks 8 were introduced in 2005. The previous versions were called Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 and Macromedia Fireworks MX 2004. Version 8 was the last version of either product produced before Macromedia was purchased by Adobe. Adobe had a different way of naming its software. The next version of Dreamweaver was Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 released in 2007. What would have been Fireworks 9 was called Adobe Fireworks CS3 instead.
Working Together
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Although good on their own, Fireworks 8 and Dreamweaver 8 work well together. Fireworks 8 lets you make animated GIFs and image maps: an HTML standard for hyperlinks placed over photos, clip art, charts and other graphic images. You can create the images and code needed for rollover button effects. You can design the layout of your website in Fireworks, save the layout as a background image or slice it into sections to be added to table cells or "div" tags. Finally, Fireworks 8 speeds up your Web pages by shrinking image file sizes.
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