I have long been an avid fan of Fireworks and Fireworks 8 is a great upgrade mainly due to its greater integration with Flash and Dreamweaver. This substantial improvement alone is enough to justify the $149.00 price for the upgrade.
Installation and Start up: Installation was easy and only lasted a few moments. Once loaded you can quickly notice some of the improvements made to the interface. These include collapsible panels that quickly give more real estate within a few clicks as well as an ability to save the workspace arrangement. That’s a great timesaver from having to set up your arrangement each time you load your program.
New and improved tools: Fireworks now includes new tool palettes for image editing, auto-shape creation, and special characters. An added image-editing palette gives speedy access to common rotation and filtering functions. Additionally, an autoshape palette helps users more easily create rectangles, circles, multisided shapes and other vector objects. Users are also given more control over their auto shapes with the Auto Shape Properties panel. Improved and new shadow choices add incredible new dimension to your work allowing users to achieve really incredible and nearly 3-D special effects.
Another great addition is the easy to use CSS Menu support that helps designers quickly create interactive popup menus all through an easy and intuitive interface wizard. The results are clean and easily customizable code. 25 new blend modes also come with this new version and easily convert to Flash content without any color or gradient loss.
Fireworks also accepts more file formats such as QuickTime Image, MacPaint, SGI and JPEG 2000.
All in all, Fireworks 8 is an outstanding tool for image editing and of course as has always been the case vector graphics editing. For existing users of Fireworks this product would rank a 5 as said it is well worth the price and the changes to the interface really improve the workflow. For new users the interface may prove the only hurdle and thus giving the total ranking a 4.