Part 1 in some of the new features in the latest version of Adobe’s Creative Suite 4 applications.
The new beta of Fireworks CS4 is giving us some insight into the upcoming features that will release with the retail version; not all features are present and you only get a 2-day trial to mess with it!
If you’re like me, Fireworks may not be one of your most common tools in your workflow. However, there are some new features that are making Fireworks a potential favorite for designers who are looking into breaking into Flex designing and speeding up their design process.
Fireworks CS4 - 9 Slice
Fireworks CS3 introduced the 9 Slice (9slice, Scale9) functionality. In CS3 this feature was only applicable to vector objects. But in CS4 this feature will be extended to raster images as well.
Below, I’ll cover a couple of the attributes of this updated feature and how to get some predictable results from it.
9 Slice preserves your corners
One of the main reasons that 9 slice was developed was to preserve rounded corners in a more dynamic way than pushing around vector points.
9 Slice does this by preserving the scale and dimension of your designated corner areas. All other areas of your graphic are scaled according to the ’slice’ that they end up residing within. The graphic below shows how each slice is scaled when an image has 9 slice applied to it and then is manipulated:
9 Slice Limitations
Because 9 slice preserves only the corner slices and scales the other five slices it tends to work the best when used on an image or vector where there is a clean horizontal and vertical area that can be stretched/scaled and not look too warped.
In our example above, the fill area is a clean, horizontal gradient. If we were to rotate that gradient out of a horizontal or vertical alignment, apply 9 slice, and then change the horizontal scale of the object, we start to see how 9 slice affects the 5 un-preserved slices:
9 Slice for Images
However, if you are working with an image that can handle the scaling distortion, or you are looking to make subtle adjustments in scale to your raster image, then 9 slice is a great solution for an otherwise time consuming problem. In the example below you can see that Fireworks CS4’s 9 slice function can really come in handy when adjusting the scale or dimensions of certain raster images, while preserving the subtle corner shapes:
More to come soon on the new features of the Adobe CS4 suite!
Enjoy!
