Once you’re happy with what you see, you can download the theme for free. Theme settings are configured on the left, colors can be dragged and dropped from the palette at the top, and all changes to a theme are displayed live in the center of the page. Moreover, jQuery Mobile offers a free Web-based editor called ThemeRoller, which handles theme customization with more finesse than Fireworks. In effect, this means you’ll need to rebuild the theme in a regular document in order to create a proper mockup for your client. The trouble is that you cannot preview the theme using your own sample content, which is disappointing given that the primary focus of this app is to construct Web mockups. Unfortunately, Fireworks does not disable properties that aren’t Web-friendly, so you have to be careful to avoid fonts and gradient types that aren’t supported by CSS.Ī built-in theme preview lets you check out your theme at any time, though you must manually reload the preview after you make changes. The subsequent five pages offer default swatches that you can tailor to your design by choosing fonts and tweaking the color of headers/footers, backgrounds, and buttons. You can also specify the style for button labels, icon backgrounds, box shadows, and rounded corners by clicking an object and adjusting its properties. The first page lets you define global assets and styles, and you’re presented two sets of common navigational icons that you can customize. There is no dedicated theme editor in Fireworks CS6 instead, you’re asked to customize the properties of objects across a multi-page template and then export it as a theme.Ĭhoosing Commands -> jQuery Mobile Theme -> Create New Theme opens a new theme document. It’s a bit of a ham-fisted process, however. In Fireworks CS6, it’s now possible for a designer (rather than a developer) to customize a jQuery Mobile theme without ever having to weed through code. The benefit is that the sprite sheet is downloaded only once, which helps speed up the site by reducing demand on the server. CSS code-defined by your slices-describes the location of each graphic element on this sprite sheet. Instead of slicing interface graphics into dozens of individual files, you can export a single image file (or sprite sheet) containing all graphic elements. The second key way Fireworks now supports CSS is via CSS Sprites. The CSS Properties panel describes aspects of these objects (for example, line weight, line color, and fill), but it needs a warning indicator to let designers know which objects cannot be fully described by CSS. The caveat-and there’s always a caveat-is that there are only a few types of graphical elements that can be fully coded by CSS. Tailor your design elements to CSS, and you can avoid contentious edits by a developer seeking to streamline the website. This feature is a great asset for developers and it benefits designers, too. Additionally, Fireworks can generate code specific to Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Webkit browsers like Safari and Chrome to ensure consistent cross-browser rendering. Select the object and visit the CSS Properties panel, and you’ll see the full list of properties along with the necessary code (which can be copied to the clipboard). Let’s say you use the vector tool to create a rectangle with rounded corners, apply a gradient fill, and add a subtle drop shadow: All this can be described by CSS. The CSS Properties panel-new to Fireworks CS6-gives developers an advantage by automatically generating code for many elements of the design. The developer then has to deconstruct the mockups, making judgments about what visual elements can be achieved via Cascading Style Sheets (CSS3), a coding language that is increasingly used to describe not just the look and layout of text, but the appearance of graphical elements such as buttons, backgrounds, and shadows. A typical workflow might have a designer creating Web mockups in Fireworks, and then passing them to a Web developer for coding.
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