Chapter 6. Automating and Extending Fireworks


In this chapter

Automating Tasks 130

Creating Custom Commands with the History Panel 134

Extending Fireworks 135

Troubleshooting 137

Best PracticesKnowing When to Use Batch Processing 138

Although Macromedia has done an outstanding job of balancing Fireworks's powerful functionality with its easy-to-use interface, they also recognize that you might want to customize the way Fireworks works to meet your needs. In this chapter, we take a look at how you can use Fireworks to reduce your design time by making repetitive tasks a snap and enhancing the Fireworks interface.

The plain truth is that although a lot of graphic and web design is fun, some repetitive tasks can become mundane. A while back, I designed a website for a client who collected and sold stamps. At any given time, he had several thousand stamps in his collection and the vast majority of them were for sale. He contracted with me to create a website for him and to digitize all the stamps so his customers could view the stamp prior to purchasing it. In addition, he wanted to put a digital watermark on the image with his company logo, so that other philatelists (the fancy name for stamp collectors) wouldn't "borrow" his images for use on their sites. This meant that for each stamp, I would have to

  • Scan the stamp.

  • Add a digital watermark to the full image.

  • Resize the stamp for display on the site.

  • Create a thumbnail of the stamp.

For a single stamp, that process would take about 10 minutes to do, which doesn't sound like much until you start getting into the sheer size of the project. At 10 minutes each, 3,000 stamps would take 30,000 minutes or 50 hours. At $50/hour, that's almost $2,500 dollarsa price that my client just wouldn't be able to stomach.

Luckily, automating the process in Fireworks helped me cut the time required to complete the entire process of digitizing the images to less than 15 hours.



Special Edition Using Macromedia Studio 8
Special Edition Using Macromedia Studio 8
ISBN: 0789733854
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 337

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