Several notable extensions take advantage of the power contained within FWLaunch.dll. One standard command, Create Web Photo Album, uses Fireworks to batch process a series of images into thumbnails; a more enhanced version of this command (Web Photo Album 2.0) is available on the Dreamweaver Exchange under the Productivity category. Also on the Exchange is a suite of three cross-application extensions known collectively as the InstaGraphics Extensions: NOTE In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that I authored two Dreamweaver-to-Fireworks commands that evolved into Convert Text to Graphics and Convert Bullets to Graphics. Macromedia took over and enhanced my initial commands, named StyleBuilder and BulletBuilder respectively, to be incorporated into the InstaGraphics extension.
All of these Dreamweaver extensions use the same basic technique for cross-application communication with Fireworks ”and they all take advantage of Fireworks capabilities exposed through its Document Object Model (DOM) and API. As you'll see in the following section, these extensions all use a single function call contained within the FWLaunch DLL ” FWexec() ”to control Fireworks. |