GM, Ford and Chrysler (with Honda and Toyota gaining all the time). Coke and Pepsi. Adobe and Macromedia.

Most markets seem to gravitate toward supporting two to three main competitors, with a number of smaller vendors trailing behind.

It’s no different in the Web graphics marketplace, where Adobe Systems Inc. and Macromedia Inc. dominate.

Adobe’s entire imaging lineup, working off Chief Executive Officer Bruce Chizen’s mantra of “create once, publish anywhere,” tends to support Web graphics at most stages of production.

Adobe decided relatively early to integrate heavily, years ago folding its standalone Web imaging app ImageReady into Photoshop 6.

Macromedia tries another tactic

Macromedia never had an application equivalent to Photoshop, so it pursued an alternative tactic, resulting in the development of Fireworks, a standalone Web graphics app.

Macromedia bundles Fireworks with other apps, marketing the suite under the Studio MX banner.

“MX is an especially large release,” said Matt Lerner, product manager for Fireworks MX. “We incorporated a lot of bug fixes and the stability is much higher now.”

Fireworks MX runs in both bitmap and vector mode simultaneously, giving users the ability to manage images, illustrations and text at the same time.

That flexibility allows designers to perform such functions as modifying an imported JPEG image with a drop shadow, or exporting the finished product using a variety of compression algorithms.

Supports many formats

A significant new feature that’s been added to Fireworks MX is the ability to open a wide range of file formats, including Adobe Photoshop documents, or PSDs.

This allows Fireworks to mimic Photoshop’s filters, enabling Fireworks to duplicate a Photoshop image. If the Photoshop file has a filter that Fireworks doesn’t recognize, users have the option to either open a “flattened” version of the image absent layer data or to open the image with layers intact and filters stripped off.

Fireworks uses JavaScript to enable users to automatically build rollover effects — where a user’s mouse movement over a defined area swaps out the image or text to create a highlighted result. So-called “third-party” rollovers, where mousing over a particular menu item changes another image on an unconnected part of the page, is also supported.

Edit once, change many

Fireworks also supports automatic image production. This XML-based function automatically changes data appearing on a particular Web graphic. This is particularly handy if a Web designer wants to use a single price-tag template and automatically populate it with hundreds of different prices. The XML file containing the variable data can be used to trigger the production of the graphics in one step.

Adobe’s flagship Web app, Graphics Server 2.0, performs a similar function, said Allister Lundberg, an Adobe product manager.

“We already have tools like Photoshop and Illustrator for creating the rich content. The Graphics Server is a tool to integrate with other server applications to automate and repurpose that content for print and for the Web.”

Easy transition

Graphics Server’s core consists of ImageReady and Photoshop libraries as well as Illustrator scalable vector graphics, or SVC, libraries.

The app uses the same core engine as ImageReady, thus enabling it to create Web graphics with the same quality as the imaging application.

That integration is handy, Lundberg said, for newspapers that want to use the same image for multiple purposes.

“One example of where a newspaper might use this product is wire service image workflow,” he said. “The paper would need these images coming down from wire services prepped for its Web site. Graphics Server can easily repurpose those incoming images automatically into a number of renditions, such as Web-ready and print-ready versions.”

To that end, the app supports a wide range of file formats that users can import or extract from watched folders, such as GIF, animated GIF, JPEG, TIFF, EPS, PDF, PSD and SVG from Illustrator.

Tight integration with PSD allows users to rely on scripts to extensively manipulate layers used in Photoshop files.

The app’s support of application programming interfaces, or APIs, lets developers integrate the software into automated workflows, Lundberg said. XML-based commands create and change images.

Users can customize the app further by writing code using APIs such as Java, Perl, Visual Basic, COM and .Net. This allows Graphics Server to mesh with standard SQL and Oracle databases as well as content management systems from vendors such as Documentum.

The app is also offered through selected original equipment manufacturers and systems integrators such as NetXposure, MediaBin Inc. (recently purchased by Interwoven Inc.), WebWare Corp., Burntsand Inc. and 2Organize.

Macromedia
800.470.7211
www.macromedia.com/software/fireworks


Adobe Systems
800.833.6687
www.adobe.com/products/server/graphics