Fireworks CS4 jumping textbox bug needs to be fixed now!

They are releasing an update soon where the main focus is that damn text engine.

"The Fireworks team is actively working on a fix for the text-shifting bug and other bugs we know are causing real pain for Fireworks CS4 users. An update will be made available when we are confident that we have corrected the problems."

If I could downgrade to CS3 I would! Adobe is extremely irresponsible.

Yes, this is so freeeekin annoying. I actually spent half a day on the phone in November to get Adobe's FTP access to download CS3 (downgrading from CS4). CS4 is completely useless now.

I went to s Fireworks user's meeting last week and complained. Their response, "what are you using text for in a graphics program?!". Unbelievable! "What are you charging us $1000 for - worthless software!

So, I hope this is fixed soon. Apparently their tech team has finally noticed the problem and are doing something.

Keep us posted. CS4 has some great features. Some day, I'd like to use them and feel confident that weeks of work won't be destroyed by bugs!

Answer for why *I'm* using text in a graphics program: I'm an INTERACTION DESIGNER and this is an INTERACTION DESIGN tool.

I'm amazed - really amazed that this is still happening in software that was released last fall. I know software updates don't happen magically but 6 months later? Uhh.. what?

Joshua - We are so on this and will be releasing an updater for Adobe Fireworks CS4 to get rid of this issue for good! Sorry for the delay in getting the updater out, we wanted to be sure fixed it for good!

In fact, send me an email and we can add anyone interested in testing the updater for us. amusselman - at - adobe - dot - com

Thanks Alan - good to hear that some at Adobe might actually care about us. I've been using Fireworks since 1998 and have been a huge Fireworks evangelist until now. It's a great tool for wireframing and prototyping.

CS4 has some great new features. Let's hope someday soon we can use it!

KEEP US POSTED!

Andrew - http://ueArchitects.com

Adobe, I understand that you want to make sure it's fixed before you go through the trouble of releasing an update. But I can't express how much this bug SUCKS and makes my daily life miserable. I would have happily installed a patch 4 months ago that made this happen 50% less frequently and installed another patch whenever it's 100% solved. I move one group of objects and suddenly I have I have to ungroup and grab every block of text and re-nudge it into place. Working at the speed of thought? Hardly.

Fireworks CS4 already crashes 1-2x per day (CS3 was almost entirely stable), there's no autosave, and I consistently lose work. GRRRR.

Kiranator - The least I can do is add you to the prerelease program to help make sure its fixed all your issues.

amusselman - at - adobe - dot - com

Alan, my colleagues at Adobe say you have released a new Fireworks version that is in use internally. Apparently it is much less buggy and doesn't crash all the time. Hopefully the jumpy text bug is fixed.

NOW WHEN CAN WE GET THE UPDATE?
It's been 6 months. And it's becoming a real drag. It's a real pain downgrading my designers to CS3 - and worse having work ruined if they use CS4.

Thanks for helping us out! Please keep us updated! (Or, just give us the update!)

Oh snap, it sounds like Adobe are finally on this, go go buffalo!

This is possibly the most annoying bug I've ever seen in a graphics program...

Bump!

Ugh! I just wasted half a day trying to work out what the hell was happening with my text.. for me it seems to work ok if I use the mouse, or transform single blocks of text with the numeric entry... but 99% of the time I want to use numeric transforming! :-(

So this has got to go down as one of the worst bugs I have every had to deal with! Can't believe there is no proper fix already!

There is also problems when resizing the canvas of a multi-page file.. slices don't move, etc..

If you're in SF, try going to Adobe tonight to tell them in person that we'd like to see an update soon...

http://www.meetup.com/Fire-On-The-Bay...
6:45pm - Tuesday, April 21
Adobe San Francisco
601 Townsend St
San Francisco, CA 94103

I'm downgrading to CS3. It's the only way to have my software keep up with the rate my brain works.

I have been tracking bugs and communicating with the FW CS4 developers through their blog for months and asking when the patch will be available.

It's interesting that they can release a half finished, untested, buggy software program when it's time to bill customers the bi-annual $500, but they want to take months and months to make sure the f'ing PATCH for the piece of cr*p is stable once your money is safely in the Adobe bank account. This is inexcusable.

Another possibility is that this was known to NOT be ready for the official CS4 release, but they rushed it to market knowing full well there would be collateral damage, but assumed that it was worth pissing off long time FW users because, heck, we've already gotten them to buy the new release and, shoot, where else are they gonna go now that we bought out Macromedia.

A corporation at it's finest.

Noticed several more bugs running Fireworks CS4 trial on Vista Business 64. Here they are:

1. Sometimes when opening Fireworks PNG source file, "layers" palette is empty. You need to close open documents and reopen them to access layers.

2. If you have complex artwork with multiple objects overlaying one another, some objects have blend modes and gradient masks, then often you encounter problems with exporting images. Fireworks fails to render properly all these objects and in exported image you'll see abrupt gradients, different colors like some blend modes are perverted. "Image Preview view" shows the same distorted artwork as exported image.

This is really annoying, because when you finished your work and ready to export it you discover you need to tweak some objects to mimic previous appearance so the Fireworks could export them without spoiling.

3. When opening PSD Fireworks discards masks applied to bitmap objects.

4. Sometimes objects on the canvas disappears or becomes partially hidden. Usually it happens with objects that have live filters applied to them. You have to hide this object, then switch it back on, then it looks ok.

5. Hot keys only work in English keyboard layout. For example if you need to type some Russian text you have to swith to English, press "T", switch to Russisn, type in the text, hit "Esc", swith back to English, hit "V". Consumes a lot of time when working with texts. As far as i know Fireworks is the only Adobe application that suffers from such bug. Please please fix it.

6. If in Windows Explorer you open a file with Fireworks and then click "Save as" Fireworks saves the file NOT in the same folder from where it was opened. It saves it in the last folder Firewors worked with. It takes much time browsing folders if you work with multiple files. Once again Fireworks is the only Adobe application that suffers from such bug. Other programs save file in the same folder where it was opened.

7. If you apply "Life Filter" to an object, for example Glow filter and then apply a vector mask to this object, you'll notice that Live filter is not properly masked. Looks like live filter is applied to a masked object, not a mask applied to an object with filter how it was done. You have no other choice but only flatten the object with applied filter and then mask it.

In general, development team did a lot of work, implemented many new features. But with this release Fireworks becomed slower, consumes more PC resources. It runs slowly on Core Duo T9400 with 4 gigs of ram. Many of old bugs from previous version where not fixed + some new appeared.

Looks like the main goal was to stuff Fireworks with new features. It's speed, stability and usability were less taken care of. But these 3 are crucial to the end users. I think they will not have reasons to upgrade unless bugs are fixed.

Thank you.

The Adobe Fireworks CS4 team has released the much awaited patch to fix some of the big issues related to text and stability. The update can be downloaded from http://www.adobe.com/support/fireworks/downloads_updaters.html. The automatic update for the application from Adobe Update Manager (AUM) is coming shortly.

After applying the update, please ensure that the version screen now shows as 10.0.3.011.

New bugs with fireworks even after update

Try exporting pages to files (fireworks png's) It dosen't

Seems to me it simply overwrites each of them to Produce a single page

Workaround?
Export current page only (export pages one by one)

I mean am i or is it a bug who is doing it cn't find anyone complaining about it :(

had a chat with fireworks executives the error or the "Bug" as I called it is only unique to a particular naming convention! which unfortunately I am using.

False alarm my apologies...

Gad to help you out Chandan!

Still after applying the update, FW crashes more than too often...Why can't you make it more snappy? It could be THE tool for the webdesign process but it still lacking in performance.

@hardhat

Can you highlight to me specific problems and the steps to run into so that we can investigate and nail it.

It's difficult to pinpoint. Right now I'm working on a document containing 7 pages. Each page has 2-6 states. (I use states to design the different stages a page can go through, rather than ending up with a lot of pages that are basically just variations of 6-7 templates...) As I switch back and forth between pages the textbox will jump on certain textfields. Also why do you set the baseline shift to 14 by default? leave it at zero, when you select a text in a textfield with two or three lines it looks like you're selecting one line of text when really you are selecting the one below...

Also, some symbols seem to cause problems, and crashes the apps when you doubleclick them. The only solution i've found is to copy the contents and create a new symbol.

Yet another problem, that is really annoying. I use the rectangle tool to draw lines, since it's easier and more reliable to change width and height than the line tool. when setting edge to 'hard' it sometimes jumps back to 'anti alias' and then upon resetting edge to 'hard' the rectangle becomes transparent!!!??

I mean I could go on for ever...even had the cursor disappear after setting the symbol properties of a button from the 'common library'

It's a pity, I used to do all my webdesign in photoshop, but let's face it, photoshop isn't equipped for the task. It's a lot more stable, snappier and all, but what does it matter when you need to update one button and then have to go through X number of photoshop files and manually update the smartobject or just plain ol layer...FW could be an epiphany. Bugs and sluggish performance is what we're left with. You really feel FW is like a leftover crumb, adobe hoped no one would ever use, so as to let it wither away and die.

@ hardhat

The text jumping which you are mentioning is when you are editing a file which was created prior to the CS4 updater or it is created in CS3.

When a pre- CS4 update file with jumped text is edited, the bounding box will jump to the original location and then any future edits should not give you any problems.

Moving a CS3 file to CS4 will cause a slight shift in the co-ordinates and this should also be just one time effort when porting the needed file from CS3 to CS4 version.

Is the base line shift all the time? coz this seems to some bug which we are not aware and will appreciate if we can have some more insight into it.

For all the crashes you are getting, I am assuming that you are sending them to Adobe when the dialog pops up. It will help even more if you can mark it with some unique text so that we can retrieve them quicker.

All this talk about CS3 file in CS4 is rubbish. I have a clean build CS4 on a new machine, and new files I have created within this are having this text box bounding issue. I used to use CS4 on Windows, and never had this issue. But on my new Mac it happens all the time.

interestingly, only 23 hours after I loose my patience and post the above comment, an Update for FireWorks on the Mac is released. It claims to have fixed the textbox bounding issue.
I have had a quick play with it, and I cant get it to fail .... yet !
So it could be this issue is now resolved.

I wonder if a "Staff" member will jump on this thread and give us the run down on it, and confirm that they are happy they have sorted it out for good.

Although I am happy to now have a fix, it is a bit of a shame it took over 8 months to arrive.... hmm....

I also had all those funky problems. Each day I'm opening Fireworks, a new bug seems to appear. I don't understand what's going bad with that software... After having experienced the BeachBall spinning forever on my finder, what was the worst bug ever (making unusable FW), I have the pleasure to introduce you, the gradient crash ! Now, each time I'm using gradients, FW crashes.
You know what Adobe ? You're selling BETA programs and it's unbearable !
CS4 is a whole hell. I use three computers (mac pro, imac, powerbook), and after all updates, everything is still shaky. Photoshop crashes almost three or four times a day, Illustrator less but crashes often too, FW is a pain in the brain cos' crashing all the time. InDesign's ok ? Waooooh what a miracle...
We're not just dorky buyers... We need professional solutions, not random ones.

Niko (France)