panels
/Are you tired of selecting your favorite commands from the Commands menu? Don't want to create a keyboard shortcut for each one? Well, then, the Commands panel is for you. It's a toolbar that provides one-click access to your commands. Switch to the "All" tab to find a list of all of your installed commands. Click a command to run it, or add it to your favorites list by clicking its star icon. Then switch to the favorites tab, where you'll find a shorter list of starred commands. Pretty simple, but pretty convenient, too.
/Envious of Dreamweaver's Site panel? Wish Fireworks MX had something like Photoshop 7's image browser? While far from complete, this panel is a step in that direction. File Explorer offers a view of your files that's similar to Dreamweaver MX's Site panel. When you've found a file you want to open, just double-click it, select it and click the Open button, or press return.
This command panel is still very much a work-in-progress (as denoted by its 0.6 version number). Its biggest current limitation is that there's no way to refresh the file view—you have to close and reopen the panel. It also works only on Windows, but Mac support is coming.
/This panel ships with Fireworks MX, so you should already have it. If I create new versions, though, I'll make them available here. Resize Selected Objects lets you make precise, single-pixel adjustments to the size of a selected object without using the Scale tool. It resizes each selected object independently, which the Scale tool cannot do.
developertools
/If you're developing Fireworks command panels in Flash, you should find this tool very useful. A common Flash debugging technique is to stick trace() function calls in your code, and then see what gets printed to the Output window. But Fireworks has lacked an output window for displaying messages from Flash movies—until now.
The Fireworks Log is basically a console window to which your Flash movie can print messages. To do this, you include the fwlog.as ActionScript file in your movie. Then you can print strings and variable values to the Log by passing them to fwlog(). To get you started, the source files for the sample "Log Test" movie are included as well.
/Fireworks has a dauntingly powerful JavaScript API, and and understanding it all can take quite a lot of work. To try out a new function, you have to write a little command script that uses it, put the script in the Commands folder, run it, tweak it, run it again, etc. I used to find myself writing a lot of commands in the form of "alert(Files.getDirectory(dom.filePathForSave))" to see what kind of data these functions would return.
Well, the Fireworks Console simplifies this process considerably. Instead of writing and running an entire command, you can simply type code snippets into a Fireworks panel and immediately see the output. It's a little like having a command line prompt for Fireworks. You could even ignore the GUI altogether and create your web graphics via JavaScript (not that I'd recommend it).
Using the console is straightforward. Type JavaScript in the Code field, press Execute or type ctrl-Enter, and the code's return value is displayed in the Results field. Pretty much any JavaScript is valid, including comments, if-then's, for-loops, etc. Two variables have already been defined for you: "dom" is equivalent to "fw.getDocumentDOM()" and "sel" is equivalent to "fw.selection".
Be careful not to write code that might return a lot of information, such as simply entering "dom". It may take several seconds to transfer all the data from Fireworks to the Flash panel. And don't do something silly like writing an infinite loop. You'll have to force-quit Fireworks if you do.
The Fireworks Console is still very much a work in progress, hence the 0.1.0 version number. But I hope you find it useful nonetheless.
commands
/To manipulate vectors with a high degree of control it's often necessary to subselect individual points on the path. But selecting lots of individual points on a complicated path can be awkward, especially if it's hard to use the marquee to select them. The commands in this extension can reduce the amount of clicking required to select those points.
Four of the commands will select all the points on the top, bottom, left or right half of the path: Select Points - Top, Select Points - Bottom, etc. This can be helpful when you want to resize the path in one dimension by moving half of its points.
Compound paths with interior holes present a special challenge. It's possible to move an interior hole by selecting all the points on it, but doing this over and over becomes tiresome. The Select Points - All command simplifies matters. If you subselect just one of the points on the interior hole's path and run the command, all the other points on the path will be selected as well. You can do this with multiple objects at the same time.
/Importing symbols from another file is one of Fireworks' most powerful functions. But if you have a lot of files that use imported symbols, it can be a hassle to update them in every file. The Update Symbols extension lets you batch-update the imported symbols in multiple files with just one step.
Running the extension displays the "Files to Open" dialog. In this dialog's "Files to Process" menu you can choose to update all of the open files, some or all of the files in the Project Log, or a manual selection of files. To select the files manually, click the ... button to display a file selection dialog. Use ctrl and shift to select multiple files. When you're done, click Done, and then OK.
The command will open each selected file in turn, update its symbols, save it, close it, re-open it, save it again, and then close it one last time. The double open and save is necessary to force the preview that's saved in the PNG file to be in sync with the updated symbols.
/The (perhaps unfortunately named) Wedgie command breaks the selected object into 2 or more wedges. This can be handy if you need to create, say, 4 rounded corners for a table frame by splitting a circle into 4 parts. The wedges are centered on the middle of the selected object. If you select several objects, they are merged into a single bitmap that is then sliced into wedges. The wedges always start at the 12:00 position and then work their way around the object clockwise.
Note that the selected object is deleted in the process of breaking it into wedges, so you may want to clone it before running the command.
/The Paste Attributes command is handy for quickly giving the same appearance to a bunch of objects. But sometimes you need to give a set of objects the same size or position. You can use the Properties panel for that purpose, but you have to type in the size or position values each time you want to apply them. The commands in this extension make that process more convenient.
To use the commands, first selelct an object and run Commands > WHXY > WHXY - Copy. This stores the object's size and position for later use. Now select one or more other objects and then run one of the WHXY - Paste commands. If you run WHXY - Paste Size, for example, all of the selected objects will be scaled to the same size as the object you ran WHXY - Copy on.
/The "Distribute to Frames" command will distribute the selected elements to frames, one element per frame. But how do you undo this operation? With the "Frames - Merge Back-Front" command. This extension performs the inverse of "Distribute to Frames": it merges all the frames in the document on to one frame, putting the contents of the last frame on top. The remaining frames are deleted.
The "Frames - Merge Front-Back" command does the same thing, but puts the contents of the first frame on the top, and that of the last frame on the bottom.
/While the rounded rectangle tool is handy, it's not very flexible. Once you've created a rectangle with rounded corners, you can't easily resize the rectangle without distorting the rounded corners. You can scale the rectangle proportionally, but what if you want to change the rectangle's proportions? You can sub-select the corner points and drag them to a new position, but that's an awkward solution. You can also grab the rectangle's corner points, but they're hard to click on, and resizing the rectangle that way changes the radius of the corners.
This command eliminates these problems by fixing distorted rounded corners. After you create a rounded rectangle, adjust the Roundness value to set the corners to the desired size. Then use the Scale tool to freely resize the rectangle, or use the Info panel to change the size numerically. (If you subselect the corners and move them or just drag a single corner, then this command will have no effect.)
After resizing the rounded rectangle (and thereby distorting its rounded corners), select it and run this command. The rectangle's corners will be re-rounded according to their original pixel radius. The Roundness percentage will be different, since the rectangle's size has changed. You can select more than one rectangle and run this command on all of them. You may find it convenient to assign a keyboard shortcut to the command.
/This package consists of two commands, one of which increases the font size of the selected text block(s) by 2, and other which decreases it. If the text block consists of multiple sizes, then the size of each run is increased or decreased by 2. So if your text block contains text with sizes of 12, 18, and 14 when you run "Text Size - Increase by 2", then afterwards the sizes would be 14, 20, and 16. You can run the command repeatedly to keep increasing or decreasing the font size.
These commands will be more convenient if you assign a keyboard shortcut to them.