Fireworks Article

Developing an effective Fireworks workflow

Adobe Fireworks CS3 includes a rich extensibility model that allows advanced users to create sophisticated custom panels (Flash panels) using a combination of JavaScript and Adobe Flash. In fact, many of the panels that ship with Fireworks—including the Align panel and the new Path panel—are Flash panels. Because the Fireworks engineering team has exposed practically every aspect of Fireworks through a JavaScript extensibility model, you're really only limited by your imagination (and technical abilities, of course).

This article is designed to give you an understanding of the entire Flash panel development process by presenting a workflow I refined through developing the Fireworks to XAML Exporter. I show you how JavaScript and Flash work together to call native Fireworks methods and guide you through the creation of a simple custom panel. By the end of this article you should see "the big picture" of this process and be ready to take a deep dive into the Extending Fireworks documentation.

Requirements

To complete all the sample projects, the following software and files are needed or highly recommended:

Fireworks CS3

• Try
• Buy

Flash CS3 Professional

• Try
• Buy

Text editor of your choice

Sample files:

• fw_xaml_exporter_source.zip (ZIP, 6.5 MB)

Includes Fireworks Developer Toolbox, FWAPI_Panel, and Infragistics Alignment Manager.

Prerequisite knowledge

Intermediate to advanced knowledge of JavaScript, ActionScript, Fireworks, and Flash.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License

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