The response to this challenge has been great so far, however, just to help things along, here is some additional details about how you can make a submission. You can either post a link to where the design is located or you can send it to challenge@communitymx.com. Please keep in mind that your submission, including any source material (including your PSD file) will be made available with any response to your challenge so that others can try/verify the challenge themselves. I will respond to your challenge in one of two ways. If your submission is the right level of complexity for it, I will write an article detailing the steps and techniques used in Fireworks to accomplish your design. If your submission is too complex or two simple then I will respond in the blog with general descriptions on how your challenge might be approached in Fireworks. In either case, please feel free to respond to my answers. This is supposed to stimulate a dialog on the subject. Although my conviction that Fireworks is the best app for developing on screen graphics is strong, I will not slam or ridicule in anyway anyone's opinion to the contrary. I will attempt to demonstrate, argue, cajole and disprove any who disagree, but I will not be mean spirited or get personal. So bring it on! Lets have some fun with this!

Now for a quick response to Brian Radford (macosxjunkie@yahoo.ca) who wrote:

I'd like to see Fireworks produce multiple comps in one image file that could be switched between with a single click of a mouse! ;-)

Photoshop Rocks!

Well, Brian, as pointed out by a few others who responded to you, Fireworks can do this, and do it well I might add. Fireworks has a frames panel that let you add...well...frames (as in frames of a movie) to your document. It is how you create animations in Fireworks. However, it also works quite nicely for doing comps of a design. In fact, there will be an example of this in response to my 1st challenge, submitted by Craig Hartel, due out the week of the 30th.

There is a chance it could be sooner, we will see. <grin>

As the title of my blog says: Fireworks is better than Photoshop. There... I said it! The gauntlet has been thrown down! Let the games begin!

Here is the challenge: Pick any web design and I can recreate it half the number of steps with a less complex final document using Fireworks than can be done with Photoshop!

If you are in to photo editing and retouching for high resolution print output, then use Photoshop. However, for everything else... Fireworks! Fireworks kills Photoshop in UI, workflow, web features, editablity of design, integration with web tools, cleanliness of code generated and more. Photoshop kills Fireworks in handling of large (2000x2000+) images, photographic retouching, and color correction. For creation and editing of graphics for on screen delivery, Fireworks wins hands down!

No, I'm not going to get off my soapbox.