Two decades ago to the day, I made the switch from Macromedia Fireworks to the GNU Image Manipulation Program:

Why? Well for one thing I really don’t have the finances as a lowly uni student to buy new licences all the time, not to mention the uncertain future of the aformentioned [sic] program after Macromedia was bought out by Adobe, and the fact that Fireworks isn’t a universal binary yet

Talk about dating myself in a paragraph! Macromedia seems like a quaint, distant memory now, and Universal Binaries in Mac parlance now refer to bundles with x86 and ARM64 code, not PowerPC and x86, or 68K and PowerPC, or whatever they decide on next.

Macromedia Fireworks was wonderful. I grew up in the early days using JASC Paint Shop Pro, but Fireworks was where I cut all my first digital assets, and edited all my first digital photos. It was ostensibly for web development, but it had just enough of everything else to be useful. It was intuitive, fast, and way more pleasant than Photoshop; at least, to me. I miss Apple Aperture, those early versions of Final Cut Pro, and Macromedia Fireworks something fierce. It’s as though the industry has since decided that quality, features, and ease of use are a marketing triangle in which we can have one or two, but not all three.

Just as I compelled myself to learn Vim and LibreOffice (ne. OpenOffice a…

Twenty years of using the GNU Image Manipulation Program, and remembering Fireworks