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Graphics have come a long way since the Web was exposed by Netscape and its Navigator browser almost five years ago, but the tools used to manipulate online images have largely been carryovers from the print world.
With today's release of Fireworks, Macromedia hopes to change that, and carve out a new market - Web graphics production - with a kind of scaled-down Photoshop for the Web.
"The major [graphics applications] were designed 10 years ago and the bulk of their functionality was applied to creating graphics for print," said Tom Hale, director of product management for Macromedia's graphics division. "They don't take into account the nature of the Internet."
Specifically, the Web puts constraints on bandwidth, Hale said, and a premium on features like interactivity and animation. But to make images comply with these different properties, designers have to put them through a chain of applications and utilities - including Adobe's Photoshop and Macromedia's own FreeHand - that animate, add interactivity, compress, and convert graphics for the Web page.
Fireworks tries to gather these tasks under the umbrella of one application.
The question is not Fireworks' appeal, said Jupiter Communications analyst Todd Haedrich, but whether it will be enough to wriggle its way into designers' existing tool kits.
"Is someone going to spend $300 who already has Photoshop?" That may be a high price tag, he thinks, for non-corporate designers who can do much of what Fireworks offers with their current applications and available freeware and shareware utilities.
Designers working to create graphics on corporate intranets and Web sites will be an easy sell, Haedrich said. "It's a non-issue - they'll pay. It's more of a question for the freelance designers, the SOHOs [small office/home office workers] - the less capital-backed individual." That market segment includes the many people with their own personal Web sites and is large enough that Macromedia can't ignore it.
This latest product represents an effort by the company to get more out of the Web market. "Macromedia has been a company oriented around multimedia development," Haedrich said. "They said we need to do this on the Web - otherwise our products are not going to have much of an audience to be sold to."
Macromedia saw its revenue drop to about $83 million in 1997, a 12 percent decrease from the year before.
Earlier attempts to address Web markets have come with Macromedia's Dreamweaver Web-authoring tool and Shockwave.
The latter is a Web browser plug-in technology that let authors create interactive page components that move, make sounds, and respond to user actions. But Shockwave's usefulness was diminished by the spread of Web scripting languages like JavaScript and Dynamic HTML.
In contrast, Fireworks, while duplicating the functions of many existing tools, finds a surprisingly open market niche not addressed by any single application thus far.
Its chances for success could come down to simple mechanics. Central to bringing in converts, whether they are corporations or individuals, believes Hale, is Fireworks' export preview. The feature lets designers see changes as they will look in a Web browser. Built-in compression controls streamline the process of finding a balance between an image's quality and the time it will take for a browser to load it. A free beta version is currently available.
"It's a very powerful tool where you can optimize for size," he said. "You can see where the edge of the cliff is and get as close to it as you want."
Hale notes that the company had to be careful in where it positioned the product relative to powerhouse graphics apps like Photoshop and its own FreeHand. "We could have used FreeHand to do this, but it would have changed FreeHand's identity," Hale said. "So we said all right, we'll start a new product."
And Hale said he doesn't intend to suggest Fireworks as a challenger to Photoshop's overall set of graphics features. "I don't want to say people should throw Photoshop away - that's a ridiculous thing." Rather, he said, Fireworks corralled the "the sweet spot" of features in Photoshop and other graphics applications that are most relevant to Web graphics.
A good strategy for both Macromedia and the market, Jupiter's Haedrich said, but one that leaves the market in control of Fireworks destiny. "It's a question of how the community out there decides to pick it up - and [Macromedia] can only affect that through trials and demos and how they market it."
And of course if Macromedia is successful in defining a new graphics market, competition could be on the horizon, Hale said. "Will other imaging vendors come into the space? I would see it as a market that is quickly emerging and that cannot be ignored."
