Firestorm

[Geoffrey J. Swenson]

I downloaded the Macromedia Firestorm beta, tried it out.


Firestorm seems to be a "object-oriented" bitmap development program.

Interface-wise it doesn't even compare to Coreldraw, especially to CD8.

Admittedly CD is not a bitmap development program per se, but with

version 8 there is a lot of capability to handle bitmap conversions, and

editing (in conjuctions with the bundled Photopaint, which really is

quite nice, even has a few things over Photoshop.)


The Firestorm interface isn't as gosh-awful as Flash2 (at least in

respect to the way objects are selected and so on) but there seems to be

no reason to draw objects in this program over coreldraw (or, for that

matter Freehand).


It may have some useful features, but I imported a vector drawing easily

created in CD7, and it was SLOWWWWW. Just loading the drawing took about

a minute on a Pentium 150 with 64 megs ram. Scaling the object took

about 30 seconds, with none of the positional feedback you get with CD.

Admittedly this drawing was (intentionally) VERY complex, but Corel Draw

8 does great bitmap output anyway with loads of control, so I'm not sure

what I'm gaining using Firestorm instead of Draw. Or even in conjunction

with Draw.


Maybe some others can chime in and show me some better reasons to look

further, but other than the noting that the beta runs fairly stable on

my system, I dunno whether there is anything outstandingly useful about

Firestorm.


-- 

Geoffrey J. Swenson

technoGRAPHIC Solutions

geoffreynwlink [dot] com

http://www.nwlink.com/~geoffrey/resume/res_wel.html



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