Abstract
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GridMaker ended up being quite popular so I decided to take a look at porting it over to Fireworks.
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When I was initially showing GridMaker to people, one of the first questions asked was whether it would work in Fireworks. Unfortunately Photoshop and Fireworks don’t have completely compatible APIs (as far as I’m aware, things may have changed with CS3 but I couldn’t find any suitable documentation) so a different approach was required. Fireworks doesn’t seem to have a nice set of GUI functions like Photoshop’s ExtendScript but it does allow embedding of Flash applications into the program itself as Command Panels.
I’ve never really used Flash before but ActionScript is pretty intuitive if you know JavaScript and ExtendScript (they’re all based on the same language) so converting the code was pretty straightforward and seems to work nicely. I particularly like how well GridMaker looks embedded into Fireworks. I won’t go into how to use it since it’s exactly the same as the Photoshop version and it doesn’t include any additional functionality yet (this is a serious possibility since Flash has far more flexibility for building user interfaces than ExtendScript).
Simply download the .swf file and place it in your “Fireworks\Configuration\Command Panels” folder, load Fireworks and GridMaker will be selectable from the Window menu. You can then choose to float it or have it docked in the toolbar
Download GridMaker for Fireworks (right-click and save link as, otherwise the swf will just load in your browser)
Comments
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Awesome tool! Thanks for creating and sharing :)
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Nima M #
11:06am, 11th May 2007This is an amazing tool many, many thanks
keep up the good work
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Kevin Cannon #
05:14pm, 03rd June 2007This doesn’t seem to work in Fireworks MX2004. The panel loads, but the textboxes just show their variable names, rather than editable textboxes.
Did you export it as a Flash 8 swf. Perhaps if you exported it as a lower version swf 6 or 7, it would work in the earlier version of Fireworks.
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I’ve re-uploaded the swf , this time I exported it as Flash 6. See if it works, I’ve no idea myself.
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Awesome, just what I was looking for!
Many thanks including Fireworks.
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Yes its very powerfull plugin i always use in my work. Thanks for sharing.
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robbie #
07:06pm, 10th June 2008In the Fireworks command, the 3,64 in the H and V input areas, why those numbers? I cannot figure that out as I’m just learning.
Thank you -
wooo
this is great. thanks man.
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Dave Foy #
01:10pm, 08th May 2007