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Someone once said, "Dying is easy. Animating in Fireworks is hard." I think it was Noel Coward. Actually, I believe the real quote was, "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard." Regardless, in the past when I had to create animation for the Web, I invariably sought out programs like Macromedia Flash or Director. But now Macromedia claims Fireworks 4.0 has come into its own as an animation platform for the Web. With 'Live Animation' controls and the ability to export Shockwave (.swf) style files, I decided to run some laps with the new upgrade.

Animation Fireworks Style
The first thing one notices about trying to build an animation in Fireworks is the lack of a traditional timeline window. In Flash, Director and Adobe Live Motion designers can visualize the structure of their animation because they can see every frame and every layer of their project at the same time. It's considerably easier to see how various layers effect other layers this way. Unfortunately, Fireworks lacks a timeline window. In Fireworks, you have a palette with tabs to access 'layers' and 'frames' but not both simultaneously. This creates some difficulties when trying to build multi-layered animations. But the process works the same. You place objects on a layer and manipulate it over a number of frames. Each layer is a film strip with any number of frames. You can combine any number of film strips to build complex animations.