Case Study of a PNG-Supporting Image Editor

Software development tends to be a dynamic and rapidly changing field, and even periodicals have trouble keeping up with what is current. To attempt to do so in a book--even one that uses the phrase ``at the time of this writing'' as often as I have here--borders on the ridiculous. Nevertheless, given PNG's unique feature set and its unfamiliarity to many of those who could make the best use of those features, I feel that it is worth the risk to explore in depth an application that appears to have, as of early 1999, the best PNG support of anything on the market: Macromedia's Fireworks 1.0, available for 32-bit Windows and Macintosh. (Version 2.0 was released while this book was in the final stages of production; information about it is noted wherever possible, but I did not have time to test it.)

Fireworks is an image editor with a feature set that rivals Adobe Photoshop in many ways, but with far more emphasis on web graphics and less on high-end printing support. In this, it is closer to Adobe ImageReady, a web-specific application intended to tune image colors and optimize file sizes. I'll come back to Photoshop and ImageReady in Chapter 4, "Applications: Image Editors".