Fireworks is an excellent UI design tool; however, Adobe decided to feature-freeze 1 it back in 2013 and (at the same time) did not offer any replacement tool to its users. Nevertheless, since Fireworks runs fine today on the latest Mac OS X and Windows OS, and since it still offers a solid UI-design feature set, many designers continue to use it and rely on it daily. For those of you who are searching for a similar tool, Sketch 3.0 2 seems to be a pretty good alternative to Fireworks, but it’s still not quite there yet; it’s Mac-only, and while its vector tools are very good and it now has artboards, pages, symbols and styles, it lacks a few of the basic features available in Fireworks. (I’ll talk more about possible alternatives to Fireworks in Part 2 of this series.) So while we’re looking for alternatives, many of us also have to continue to use Fireworks 3 , and, as every designer out there knows, Fireworks works best with extensions ! This article features some of the most useful (and free) Fireworks extensions that will help you work faster and be more effective with Fireworks; I have tested many of them myself, to be sure that they work flawlessly. In an upcoming article, I’ll be covering many articles and tutorials which I highly recommend that involve UI design and Fireworks, as well as a few freebies, such as editable Fireworks PNG files, templates, styles, Fireworks resource libraries, and so on. To make the content of Part 1 better organized (and for easier navigation), I have grouped the extensions (commands, command panels and auto shapes) into the following main sections: John Dunning’s extensions 4 Aaron Beall’s extensions 5 Matt Stow’s extensions 6 Extensions by other extension developers 7 Project Phoenix for Adobe Fireworks 8 Conclusion 9 John Dunning’s Extensions Lorem Ipsum 14 10 Auto Shape Fireworks is a very good UI prototyping tool (we’ve covered this topic in previous articles such as “ Developing a Design Workflow in Adobe Fireworks 11 ,” “ Interactive Prototypes and Time-Savers With Adobe Fireworks 12 ” and “ iOS Prototyping With TAP and Adobe Fireworks 13 ”). Without a doubt, another very important part of the prototyping process is working with text. When working with prototypes, placeholder text is often used
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