Macromedia's bundling of Dreamweaver 3 and Fireworks 3 is a tremendous value and a terrific pairing of applications. Fireworks--a versatile and powerful tool for building graphics for Web sites--and Dreamweaver--a tool of choice for building sites of all kinds--are both strong tools on their own. Bundled together, Macromedia has built a versatile and robust Web-development environment. Creating good Web graphics is a skill unto itself, but Fireworks has many built-in tools for easing the pain. File size and color palette compatibility are the key issues, which Fireworks handles gracefully, but it can also create animated graphics as GIF or Flash files, as well as create rollovers and animated buttons.
But Fireworks is much more than a tool for creating Web graphics; it's an excellent graphics package with many of the features a good bitmap image editor possesses, such as gradients, fills, and organic-media strokes. But because Fireworks is vector-based, even strokes using a watercolor brush can be edited later into something like a crayon- or charcoal-style stroke. Fireworks exports files to Adobe Illustrator, JPG, BMP, and GIF formats, as well as to animated GIF or Flash formats.
Fireworks becomes a more powerful tool when allied with Dreamweaver, Macromedia's Web-page authoring tool. Dreamweaver is a full environment for building and managing Web sites, allowing the user to edit HTML pages graphically or through a text editor. In addition to all the usual table tools, font-editing tools, and HTML-creation tools, Dreamweaver supports the creation of Dynamic HTML and features a time line for editing such animation.
The Dreamweaver disc also includes the latest versions of Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, so Web pages can be tested for browser compatibility in either one. --Mike Caputo
