When comparing Fireworks vs FluidUI, the Slant community recommends Fireworks for most people. In the question“What are the best mockup and wireframing tools for websites?” Fireworks is ranked 4th while FluidUI is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose Fireworks is:
From lo-fidelity wireframe, into clickable prototype and then assemble the images for the final hi-fi build as well.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Can be used for the entire life-cycle of the design
From lo-fidelity wireframe, into clickable prototype and then assemble the images for the final hi-fi build as well.
Pro Layer Sharing
Features such as 'Layer Sharing' allows you to quickly update shared components such as headers across multiple pages. Other mockup tools such as Mockingbird will require you to manually propagate changes across all the pages.
Pro PSD compatible
Open PSD files
Pro Awesome Symbol Libraries
A significant advantage over web-app style mockup tools are the symbol libraries for Fireworks.
From boagworld:
Both symbols, styles and vector shapes can be saved for re-use and collected into useful library resources. In addition Fireworks ships with a common library of useful objects including buttons, browser and application elements for both Mac and Windows look and feel.
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Pro User friendly
The learning curve is relatively low compared to other software that supports animations/transitions. Both building the wireframes and designing the interactions is all drop and drag.
Pro Tools for team collaboration
Work with your team on a design. Connect on live video calls and chat or add comments.
Pro Supports realistic gestures & transitions
You can simulate all the typical iOS gestures such as tap, double tap, swipe & long hold. These gestures then can trigger animated transitions such as sliding, fading, pop in, & flip. This enables you to create very realistic interactable demos of your app. Checkout the demo page for some examples.
Pro Awesome version control
Every action you or your team takes automatically creates a revision you can easily revert to.
Pro Provides UI assets from all the versions of iOS
The UI library is huge and very high quality. All the UI required to design iO7 apps is included as well as iOS 6 and basic wireframing elements. For example in iOS7 it provides:
- Backgrounds
- Navigation & status bars
- Layouts (list pickers, maps, keyboards, scroll etc)
- Controls
- Typography
- Icons
Pro Fast
Using the app is feels very snappy.
Pro Free forever for a single project & 10 screens
They have a very reasonable free tier with the paid versions starting at $12/month.
Pro Lets you test on an iPhone as well as in the browser
You can preview your designs live in the browser as well as send them to a mobile device to better simulate the UX.
Pro Makes it easy to plan out the app workflow
Fluid isn't just about wireframing static screens. You can plan out all the user flows and then define the transitions between them. This is really handy for planning out the entire user workflow.
Cons
Con Is being phased out
Adobe is ditching Fireworks. So those nasty bugs will never get fixed.