Subtitles of the Movie

When you open a document in Fireworks for the first time, Fireworks activates the work environment including the Document window, which dominates the center of the program. The Tools panel, over to the left, contains label categories; six categories including Selection tools, Bitmap tools, Vector tools, Web tools, Colors, and then the View tools. You have a Properties Inspector on the bottom. At first this displays properties for the document such as canvas size, image size, optimization option here, for the whole document, but when you select various objects on the canvas here it changes to reflect properties for those objects. So, for example, if I click on text I can modify text properties here, or if I click on graphics, I can modify graphics properties. Along the top you have your standard menu items, commands related to Files, Editing objects, Viewing the documents, Selecting objects, Modifying canvas, Selections, Transforming objects, and so on. Commands related to text, font size, style and alignments, commands for running scripts, batch commands, creative commands such as adding arrowheads, adding drop shadows. Filters are next, and you have a series of windows here. Here the Window menu option lets you open up various Panels, actually is that they're called in Fireworks. These panels are, to start with, grouped together, but you can change the grouping by rearranging the assemblages of panels. We'll be talking a lot more about these panels in the next movie. You can use the various View modes; actually there are three view modes on the bottom of the Tools panel. Use the View mode buttons here to control the layout of your workspace. Standard screen mode is the default document window view. The next one, Full Screen with Menus mode is a maximized document window view set against a gray background with menus, toolbars, scrollbars, and panels all visible. The third option, Full Screen mode is a maximized document window view set against a black background with no menus, toolbars, or title bars visible. The Document Preview buttons here on the top of the interface are very important. They display the graphic as it would appear in a Web browser based on the optimization settings that you've established for the document. This is important because with Fireworks you typically work on graphics that will be displayed on the Web and these views provide a convenient way to check out how your work will look in a browser. For example, if I go to the Preview notice that I can roll over my slices and I can see how they look without having to open up a browser. Go to File, and Preview, and Browser. It's all right here; easy for me to check. I've also got another view here for showing my Hotspots and Slices, and notice in the preview it hides those Hotspots and Slices to a degree so I can see the work and how it will appear in the browser. Also, another important features, I have some information here on the bottom that will; let's turn off the slices and hotspots, that will tell me what kind of document I'm working on: JPG. How long it will take to load in a 56K modem, 3 seconds, and it's 2 megabytes and 295K, my size there. The two-up and four-up displays will show additional information that varies depending on the file type selected. You can use the Optimize panel to optimize a document while viewing the preview here. Notice that I have my original and then I have what it will look like as a JPG. I can open up the Optimize panel; a very helpful panel, and let's convert this to a JPG-quality 18, and you can see this really starts to degrade, so it's a very convenient way of setting your optimization values. You can also do this for four images all at the same time; adjust their optimization settings and then compare them all at once. Notice that the roll-overs are also working here, so this is previewing it, how it will look as a GIF document, as a JPG document, as a GIF with zero percent dither, and I can, notice, change these settings. There is the original. Now the reason that this four-up is useful is that you can optimize the entire document at once, or only selected slices. If I turn my slices back on, I can click on just one of these slices here, and notice that this slice is going to be exported as a Web Snap 128. You can change that, and then preview it with different file formats here. So, this is just another example of how Fireworks is just optimized to help you with one specific task, and that is, optimizing your graphics for Web delivery. Let me now say a few words about the Tools Panel, over here to the left. It's organized into those six categories that I mentioned earlier. Some of the tools will have a small triangle in the lower right-hand corner. This indicates that that's a tool group, or part of a tool group. For example, the rectangle tool, right here, has a variety of tools in the group: Ellipse, Polygon, and then a bunch of graphics here; arrows, donuts, L-shapes, pies. To select a tool from the group, choose it from the pop-up menu there; let's go back to the original view here, and now notice I can go ahead and use that tool. Let's fill that with something so you can actually see it there. There's my arrow. Now when you do select a tool, the Properties Inspector, down here, let's open that up. Notice that these panels can also be maximized and minimized. Now the Properties Inspector, after you select that tool, provides options for modifying the properties of that tool. Now a lot of your work in Fireworks will be done in its many windows or panels. Let me now move on to the next movie and review all of the important panels in Fireworks CS3.