Flash CS5: The Missing Manual

Importing Fireworks Graphics

Fireworks is another program that's part of Adobe's Creative Suite family. Fireworks's specialty is performing all sorts of graphics tricks for people who design websites. It has tools for creating buttons, rollover images, and other web graphics. For example, Fireworks can take a photo file and shrink it down to a very small file size, so it'll look fine on a website, but maybe not so great in print. Fireworks creates most of its magic using the standard web language (HTML), and graphics files (JPEG, GIF), with a little JavaScript for programming chores. Although Flash produces SWF files and uses ActionScript for programming, these two programs play well with each other, and you'll often find reasons for swapping files back and forth between them.

Note

Flash and Fireworks have a working relationship that precedes the Adobe era. Both were published by Macromedia until Adobe purchased the company.

Fireworks is a hybrid in that its working file format (PNG) holds both photographic images like Photoshop and vector drawings like Adobe Illustrator. Designers often create complex images in Fireworks that may include photographs, text, and shapes. They save their work in PNG files, but they export the files to smaller, simpler formats to use on the Web. Flash can import almost any of the files that Fireworks saves or exports, but to get the most graphic goodness from Fireworks, it's best to save the file as a PNG, and then import it into Flash. This section shows ...