The History palette, which is nonlinear, lets you select nonconsecutive commands to run or save as scripts. Text creation is flexible, with full support of Live Effects and smooth anti-aliasing with background colors. Though the text quality of very small fonts is not as sharp as in Photoshop, we found this to be the best text tool in the roundup. Fireworks is the best program for creating and managing Web objects. Rollover effects, image slices, and hot spots are remarkably easy to create, with dedicated commands and tools.
Animation is frame-based, with no timelines or object paths.
Although there are no transition effects, you can tween an object's opacity, transformation, and Live Effects. Layers may be distributed to frames. The Fireworks palettes are varied and customizable, and they can be saved. The Create Shared Palette command looks at the palettes of all the files in a specified folder and averages their settings into one new palette. The zoomable Export preview is full-featured, with transparency and matte options.