In terms of new features, Macromedia has dramatically enhanced the pop-up menu feature that first appeared in Fireworks 4. I say "dramatically enhanced" because, as many of you found out, the old version didn't exactly work correctly in most situations, particularly when the pop-up menu was supposed to appear somewhere other than the top of the page. Fireworks MX fixes this and also expand's the feature's capabilities. For those who don't know anything about this feature, Fireworks has the ability to create full-featured drop-down menus for use on the Web. What's more, the program makes the process incredibly easy. Simply enter text and links and choose from the various preset styles, and Fireworks does the rest for you, including the creation of the necessary HTML.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] The new, improved version of Fireworks' pop-up menu feature also allows you to choose between horizontal and vertical menus and also specify the position of both the menus and the submenus.



Fireworks MX also, of course, adopts Macromedia's MX-style interface, as well as some MX functionality, such as the ability to work with data-driven graphics. (This is a great feature for those who need to output variations of a graphic based on text, numbers and images from a data source.) I'm neutral on the interface itself. It works, and it doesn't get in my way, but I haven't seen any vast improvements over previous Macromedia interfaces, although I do like the ability to link palettes together in one long palette, along with the ability to collapse and expand the palettes as needed.



Other new features include:

• Scriptability and support for commands that are downloadable from the Macromedia Exchange (free of charge).
• Preservation of text properties when importing files from Photoshop.
• Tighter integration with Flash MX and Dreamweaver MX.
• A new "Quick Export" feature for exporting to and working with various programs from Macromedia and other developers, like Adobe.

As with several of Macromedia's recent software updates, Fireworks MX does not include a vast number of new features, though the improvements to older features and some of the new features do make it a worthy upgrade.



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