End of an Era: Adobe Pulls the Plug on Fireworks

If you are a user of the popular UI design and prototyping tool Adobe Fireworks, this will greatly concern you: At the recent MAX conference, Adobe announced their next generation of tools (known as CC), including Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash Pro… and many others. But not including Fireworks.

What does this mean for Fireworks? Well, tragically it does means they are pulling the plug on it. There has been speculation about the future of Fireworks for quite some time, and Adobe has finally put all gossip to rest with this simple statement:

“We have decided not to update Fireworks to CC and instead will focus on developing new tools to meet our customers needs.“

If you are wondering “why”, Adobe has attempted to answer this: Fireworks seems to have an overlapping set of functionality and features with other Adobe offerings such as Photoshop and Illustrator. The goal is to terminate Fireworks and focus on the more popular applications such as Photoshop. However, Fireworks CS6 will continue to be available but updated with only necessary security updates and bug fixes.

There may be yet some hope for Fireworks: The guys behind Firetuts.com have started a petition on Change.org asking Adobe to open-source Fireworks, allowing development to continue. At first glance this may seem optimistic, but you just never know…

What do you think of this move by Adobe? For us? It feels like the end of an era…