Written by Alan Musselman
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
Where do you work and what keeps you busy?
I work for Adobe, currently out of the old Macromedia headquarters in San Francisco, CA. My job is basically to make sure that Flash Player continues to be awesome. This means creating tools that test existing functionality of the player as well as working with new features, guiding their development up until a new release.
One of the benefits of working for Adobe is that I have the entire suite of creative tools at my disposal. Outside of Flash, about 95% of the imagery I work with comes from Fireworks or at least makes its way through that application at some point in time.
What type of project are we showcasing today where Adobe Fireworks was used in the process?
The project is an interactive locations map for the video game Burnout Paradise. It’s a Flash application that superimposes locations and driving routes over an aerial map of the game’s environment through the use of KML, Google’s XML format for representing geographic data in applications like Google Earth. This allows players to find locations in the map that are otherwise not obvious when playing the game or, alternatively, share custom locations or custom races with other users (thanks to KML).
The use of Fireworks may not be immediately apparent. Most, if not all, of the interface graphics were created in the Flash authoring tool, and the main background is, for the most part, just a background image provided by Criterion Games, Burnout Paradise’s developer. Upon closer inspection, however, you may notice that the background loads in, not as one solid image, but rather as a series of smaller tiles. You can find each of these tiles in the tiles directory of the main application page. If you haven’t guessed it, these tiles were exported from the original full image by Fireworks.
But that’s not all. The real power of Fireworks in terms of this application comes with the map overlays (locations and routes). All of the overlays are defined in KML, making the map very dynamic and versatile. However, using KML adds a lot of complication to the project since you can’t just physically draw the overlays on top of the original map, export that image, and then be done with it. Those overlays have to be defined in KML – that means as text, not pixels. Or does it?
Using the JavaScript extensibility layer in Fireworks with symbols and vector shapes, I was able to create all the map overlays graphically and run a command script that automatically converted them to their respective KML files. This means I never had to edit a KML file by hand. All I did was add locations or otherwise draw map data on the screen in Fireworks and run a custom command that generated them for me. When working with maps like the i88 Freeway Access map (KML), you can imagine how much of a time saver this kind of automatic generation can be.
Are there features in Adobe Fireworks that saved you time and money?
As seen with interactive map, the integration of bitmap and vector graphics combined with the extensibility options make Fireworks an extremely useful tool for saving both time and money. There’s so much that Fireworks can already do. And usually, if it can’t do something you need it to, you can easily write a script or develop a panel to do it for you.
It all comes down to simplification and automation. The simpler the workflow, the easier it is to get work done. Because Fireworks supports both vector and bitmap graphics out of the box, it greatly limits your reliance on other tooling often making it the only dependency for some projects. Combine that with a powerful scripting and automation API and you can get a lot done with a little effort – and through processes that can be carried over to different projects.
What current web related technologies are most favored when designing and developing for the web?
Obviously HTML/CSS/JavaScript are preferred when they can get the job done. As you move into more dynamic and interactive content, Flash starts to become a bigger player. I may be a little biased given my work with Flash Player, but I’m also not one of those people that thinks Flash should be used everywhere by everyone. There is a time and a place for Flash, and I think that it’s important to know when and where that is.
Do you remember your “Aha” moment you had experienced when first opening up Adobe Fireworks?
The first moment I remember in working with Fireworks involved creating rollovers for an HTML web page. This was with Fireworks 3 if I remember right. The win there was the ability to create effective rollovers in a matter of seconds through a (fairly) intuitive and simple interface. At that point in time I was in college and had no idea how to program rollovers myself by hand. Luckily, with Fireworks, I didn’t have to. It instantly became my go-to application for web page effects. It wasn’t until later (around MX timeframe) that I really started to use Fireworks for image creation and manipulation.
Are you involved with any communities on the web?
I frequent kirupa.com more than anything else. It’s got a large focus on Flash development but spans across just about every other facet of development for the web as well, even including Silverlight. I used to be involved with more communities but my lack of free time recently prevents me from being very active with any of them.
Do you have a place on the web you call home? Where can we find you?
My personal site is senocular.com. I will post things there from time to time, but you might see more activity from me on kirupa.com – notably on the forums there.
