IOS does its own PNG compression for the assets in your mobile app but this leaves with no control over image optimsation.

Here is a png file for testing.  It is a 230kb Fireworks png file.  A quick 24bit png export from Fireworks produces a 6kb png file with no much visual loss.
However when the source file is compress by xcode, it produced a 19kb file.  So using Adobe Fireworks will gives you up to 3 times better than letting xcode handle it for you. 

(download)

Click here to download:

adobe-fireworks-is-better-than-xcode-for-png-assets-compression-for-iphone-ipad-ImlIGFjnipzydizDpgyG.zip (202 KB)

http://blip.tv/building43/build-your-iphone-app-mockup-with-adobe-fireworksbu...

Luke Kilpatrick in a video talked about the process of iphone prototyping and why he uses Adobe Fireworks.
In 1-2 hours time, anyone can piece things together to show and discuss with anyone. You will find out lots more in this video.

In Fireworks there are 3 types of slice mode - Foreground, Background and HTML.  HTML mode is use to add custom text or render html codes in a page.
You can also use this feature to build useful interactive components to enhance the experience for your prototypes.

Here is a quick snapsot of the steps you can do for yourself too. I use the javascript plugin from Chosen - http://harvesthq.github.com/chosen/

To celebrate the launch of the D2WC event with so much buzz on Adobe Fireworks,  I have released a new set of text styles.
Hope you like it and will play with it.

Download the styles here.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1677957/Text%20Effects.stl

The Designer / Developer Workflow Conference (D2WC)
I believe every designer or developer out there will be watching this event.  It is packed with lots of awesome sessions by speakers around the world.

This year, i am so excited that Adobe Fireworks will be 1 of the key focus where Dave Hogue, Jim Babbage and Tom Green talk about Fireworks from prototyping, web and mobile and workflows.

I will be blogging closely on the highlights of the Fireworks sessions.

Download the iOS app here
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/d2wc-2011/id448045715?mt=8

As we all know channels helps us to find the most contrast of an image to extract objects from the background.  We often go to Photoshop to perform this kind of tasks. Now with the Channels styles, you can do the same in Fireworks.  You will get exactly the same set of channels that you see in Photoshop.

Download the "Channel Styles" here
(The set contains of RGB channel each, Red & Blue channel, Green & Red channel and Blue and Green channel. Also includes the Alpha Channel and Desaturate)

Tutorial

Step 1:  Open an image you like to use

Step 2:  Duplicate the image

Step 3:  Apply Channel style on the duplicated image to get the best contrast

Step 5:  Flatten the duplicated image

Step 6:   Apply Level to futher enhance the contrast (more white in the background)

Step 7:   Lasso the area at the top to make a selection of the background area near her hair

Step 8:   Paint over with White Brush to remove the background completely

Step 9:   Magic Wand the white background to select the background

Step 11:  Choose "Convert Marquee to Path" to turn selection into a vector path shape. Since is a path object, you can modify the points using the awesome path panel with the subselection tool.

Step 12:  Now cut the path object

Step 13:  Add layer mask to the original photo

Hope you find the Channel Styles useful with photos.  Enjoy!

1. First, we draw a button on the four states: the "normal", "mouseOver", "mouseDown" and "unavailable".  These are also the object names which we will use later as button labels for the rich symbol.
   
   
   
   
2.  Next Align Vertical Center the 4 states so that they overlap each other. 
   
   
   
   
3. Then select all 4 states, and press the F8 key to open "Convert to Symbol" dialog window
   
4.  Enter name for the symbol, choose Graphic symbol and enable 9-slice scaling guides
   
   
5.  Enter symbol edit mode and add a text object and name it as "label"
   
6. Make sure the text object is within the safe area of 9-slice guide
7. Set the text object is align to Center in the Properties Inspector

8. Next go to Command menu and choose "Create Symbol Script"
9. In the "Create Symbol Script" dialog box, browse to the graphic symbol you just saved
   
10. Set the following properties as show
11. Done. Your Rich Button Symbol is created inside the Common Library, Custom folder.
12. Go and open the rich symbol jsf in a notepad
13. Paste the code given below and save the jsf.  This is to change the state properties into a dropdown
    
14. Now drag the button symbol to canvas and test the button

Open the jsf file and paste the code as shown

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

switch (Widget.opCode){
case 1: setDefaultValues(); break;
case 2: applyCurrentValues(); break;
}

//Initialization function
function setDefaultValues(){
var values = new Array();

//Establish Label and State property, and to define the initial value;
values.push({ name:"Label", type:"text", value:"My Button" });
values.push({ name:"State", type:"ComboBox", value:"normal,normal,mouseOver,mouseDown,unavailable"});

//With built-in method to the current property gives the initial value;
Widget.elem.customData["currentValues"] = values;
}

function applyCurrentValues(){
//Get the current value
var vals = Widget.elem.customData["currentValues"];
//State the current status list entry to obtain the name
var state = vals[1].value.split(",")[0].toString();

//When an error is encountered can alert (); to Debug;
//alert(state);

//Based on user input to change the label value
Widget.GetObjectByName("label").textChars = vals[0].value;

//In the drop-down list, select the user to display or hide the corresponding button background image;
Widget.GetObjectByName("normal").visible = (state=="normal");
Widget.GetObjectByName("mouseOver").visible = (state=="mouseOver");
Widget.GetObjectByName("mouseDown").visible = (state=="mouseDown");
Widget.GetObjectByName("unavailable").visible = (state=="unavailable");
}

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

One of enhancement in this 5.1 is the support for better improvement for color optimization algorithm.  Fireworks has been having this issue of exporting as GIF, PNG8 for gradient colors due to their limitation. You will have this banding issues which make is quite unusable.

Now this have been tweaked and the result is amazing good.  This is good news for people creating assets for mobile application and mobile web site. The size of bitmap is a big matter since downloading speed is critical.

Here is a screenshot of the comparison.

Here is a great example of png8 in smaller file size and yet same result as png24

png8 - 8kb

Creative Suite CS5.5 will include Fireworks CS5.1, which is a minor update from Fireworks CS5.0.

In addition, we will be releasing a patch for Fireworks CS5.0 users.  This patch will include all of the bug fixes that are going into CS5.1.  It will not, however, include the subscription engine that will be part of CS5.1, so it will not fully upgrade CS5.0 to CS5.1. To identify the builds:

n  The full CS5.1 internal build number will be 11.1.

n  After applying the patch to CS5.0 the internal build number will be 11.0.1.

The following bug fixes will be included in the patch and the Fireworks CS5.1 release.
=======================================
Major crash bug fixes
Thank you for using the crash reporter to submit crash problems. Our developers figured out the root cause of many crashes and fixed a variety of unexpected crash bugs when using the following functions and APIs.

• PS Live Effects area
• Vector tool
• Layer naming, editing in multiple pages
• Undo/redo name change
• Find and replace
• Saving files
• Opening legacy Fireworks 8 file
• Win API related changes for 64bit

=======================================
Color optimization improvement
We’ve heard customers’ complaints about the color banding issue of GIF, PNG8, JPEG optimization, and now we have improved color optimization to enable multiple bit depth algorithms for color optimization.

=======================================
Out of memory prevention on Win
Please be aware of 32bit application limitations. Since Fireworks is 32bit application, it is limited to accessing up to 2GB of RAM on Windows. As RAM prices have dropped, you might have a higher-end machine loaded with 8GB or more of RAM, but Fireworks cannot access anything but the first 2GB. Instead of popping up an out of memory dialog box, and risk losing data,  we’ve modified the behavior to bring up a “Low memory” warning dialog box so you can save and close the document, and delete the old history to free up memory. You may also assign a keyboard shortcut to bring up the dialog box to delete the history and close the document too.

=======================================
Enable Save on Crash on Mac
When an application crash occurs on the Mac platform, Fireworks saves the most recent working file onto the desktop to help recover the file.

Improvements:
=======================================
Sticky Save As… location
Fireworks used to keep the same file location as the opened file when the user chose “Save as…”. Fireworks CS5.1 will respect the last saved location.
Choosing export slice from the context menu also preserves the last saved location.

=======================================
AIR SDK update
We replaced the AIR 2.0 SDK with AIR 2.5.1 SDK for creation of AIR applications in Fireworks.

More Bug Fixes
=======================================
FXG related bug fix

• Buttons were not appearing properly in Flash Catalyst after opening a .fxg file that contains buttons.
• FXG Symbols (button, graphic, and Animation) with same symbol ID were not being exported properly.
• RichText tags in exported FXG were[JGW1] required to have a fontFamily attribute.
• Fireworks threw an error while exporting a FXG that contained text with missing fonts or legacy text.
• When an empty text object with the cursor on it is present, Fireworks threw an error while exporting to FXG.

=======================================
Image preview now preserves the settings done through “Save as…”  options dialog box.

=======================================
Fireworks no longer crashes when you try to edit a symbol with a blank name.

=======================================
When an empty text object with the cursor on it is present, Fireworks threw an error while exporting to CSS and Images

=======================================
When exporting an image, nearly white objects on a white background turned transparent.

=======================================
File overwriting warning didn’t pop up for “images” when exporting as HTML and images.

=======================================
The focus was not on the file name in the Windows Export dialog box, and the keyboard could not be used in that dialog box.

=======================================

Regards,

Takashi Morifusa
Fireworks Sr. Product Manager

When Adobe Fireworks was launched, i did a demo presentation of the 9 key features. Some of you may have forgotten already. So here is the recap of the slides for those who have missed it.

In the first few slides, i showed about how the Adobe UX team uses Fireworks to do brand identity and splash screens design inside Fireworks. Cool right?