Favorite Adobe Fireworks Extensions
Now that Adobe Fireworks CS6 has been released, there is much interest in how to use it more effectively. Fireworks is a powerful tool, but it can be made even more powerful by adding extensions. I’ve been using Fireworks for more than twelve years, and here are some of my favorite extensions, the ones I could not live without:
- Annotations Panel ($5.99 and worth every single shiny penny!)
- Arc Tool and Autoshape
- Calculator Panel
- Copy Paste Guides
- Export Commands (CSS, SVG, and more)
- Export Selection
- Glyphs Panel ($2.99)
- Grids Panel (create custom grid overlays for any design)
- Guides Panel
- Greeked Text Autoshape
- Import Multiple Files as Pages
- Image Placeholder Autoshape
- Inherit Page Settings (Fireworks CS5 and later only)
- Linked Images
- Lorem Ipsum Panel
- Lorem Ipsum Autoshape
- Multi-Border Rectangle Autoshape
- Pixelate Selection (curiously useful)
- Prefix Page Numbers (to keep all of those exported pages in proper order)
- Smart Knife
- Smart Punch
- Smart Resize
- Specctr ($49.99 or free for the Lite version – a powerful tool for extracting specs from designs)
- Tables (perhaps one of the most amazingly helpful extensions)
- Transform Panel (this one needs to be updated, but it’s still helpful)
There are many other commands and panels I have installed, but these are the extensions that I install right away. Here are my favorite people (and resources) in the Fireworks world, because they are almost single-handedly responsible for the majority of the extensions listed above:
- John Dunning
- Aaron Beall
- Matt Stow
- Ale Munoz (and Orange Commands)
- Adobe Fireworks Exchange
- Senocular (some older but still useful extensions)
I hope you find this list helpful, and please leave a comment (with a link!) if you have your own favorite extensions you’d like to tell others about.
How about Grant Hickson’s Gradient Panel?…
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/fireworks/articles/gradient_panel.html
Many times, I find it valuable… 🙂
Btw, thanks for sharing that list of extensions — that would made a cool article (if details about each extension could be shared in more detail), hint, hint 😉
Thanks for this great list! I didn’t have some of the amazing extensions yet and they are all pretty damn awesome.
RE: Michel > Grant Hickson’s Gradient Panel doesn’t work in FW CS6. At least it doesn’t work on the mac version that I’m running.
Great list Dave! Some there I hadn’t known about. Always interesting to see other FW Guru’s extensions.
Thanks for this list! Always good to know if there’s something out there that I’m missing out on.
Specctr has been a great find for me and my team. Saves countless hours of creating callouts for our engineers.
http://www.specctr.com
@Ryan:
It doesn’t? Ahh, bad news! 🙁
Did it work for you on the Mac, with Fw CS5.1 or CS5?…
On the brighter side, in Fw CS6, we have much better control over gradients, right in the PI panel, which is good…
Thanks for the shout-out, Dave!
I have downloaded the .mxp file for…
•Arc
•Placeholder
yet, I am unable to find them anywhere once I add them to my extension manager. All indications say it should be available, but I see nothing.
I’m not sure if there are other dependencies, or perhaps they are not compatible with CS6
Bradley,
The Arc and Placeholder extensions add the drawing tools in two places: look in the Autoshapes Panel (Window > Autoshapes) and in the Toolbar in the vector shape tools (click on the little black arrow to the lower right of the Rectangle tool to open the panel and expose the other vector drawing tools.)
There was a change in how the drawing tools and autoshapes work in CS6, and I think the version of the tool in the Autoshapes Panel uses the wrong icon image, but it should still work. Everything works (and looks) normally in CS5.5 or earlier.
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