It's been a while since Fireworks was last upgraded and, in the past couple of years, this all-in-one web graphics program has been rather overshadowed by the huge success of its stablemate, Flash.

But with Macromedia currently revamping its entire product range under the MX masthead, it has taken this opportunity to give Fireworks an overhaul.

The most obvious change in this version is the redesigned interface. All of Macromedia's MX products now have the same basic interface design, consisting of a series of floating tool palettes that can be grouped together to provide instant access to most of the main tools.

Fireworks has also borrowed the Inspector palette from the company's Dreamweaver product. It's a context-sensitive toolbar that displays the main properties and settings associated with whatever you've selected.

The default arrangement of all these palettes could seem intimidating to newcomers, though. The workspace is awash with them at first, but you do have the option of collapsing each palette so that only its name tab is visible.

Otherwise you can simply hide palettes altogether so that only the main tools you need are visible onscreen. Macromedia has also made an effort to cater for new users with a palette called Answers. This leads you to a number of tutorial files that provide a general introduction to web graphics and specific features within Fireworks.

These are primarily cosmetic improvements, though. A more fundamental change in this upgrade is the new 'modeless' approach to design work.

Fireworks provides an impressive combination of vector and bitmap graphics tools, but in previous versions, you had to switch between separate modes to use them. Now you can use both sets of tools simultaneously.

There are also a number of new painting tools, such as Blur, Sharpen and Smudge, as well as a clever modeless Gradient tool that can work with either vector or bitmap graphics or text. The ability to combine vector and bitmap graphics so easily is impressive and provides designers with greater creative freedom.

Moving beyond simple graphics, Fireworks also includes new options for creating interactive navigation controls, such as pop-up menus. There's a new Pop-Up Menu wizard that provides options such as horizontal or vertical menus.

This allows designers to create complex menus and navigation controls easily, with no need to master scripting or programming techniques. Once you've selected the options you want, Fireworks will automatically create the required JavaScript code, then allow you to preview the result in a browser or export it directly into another design or graphics program of your choice.

Another good automation tool is the Data-Driven Graphics wizard, which lets you create a basic template design for a page or a banner ad, then specify that certain text or graphics elements will be set as variables to be linked to an XML file created by a database.

If you're prepared to roll up your sleeves and do some real programming, you can even modify Fireworks using the Extensibility API included in this upgrade.

This allows you to add new features (called Extensions) to Fireworks by designing an interface for the feature within Flash. You can also download Extensions designed by other people from Macromedia's website.

All this makes for quite an impressive upgrade. Fireworks MX is certainly more powerful than ever, but its ability to combine vector and bitmaps graphics so easily makes it very comfortable to work with. Designers will appreciate its graphics tools and there's more power for ambitious users prepared to delve beneath the surface.

Price: £219.99 (ex. VAT).

Minimum requirements: Windows 98/SE/ME/NT 4.0/2000/XP; Pentium II 300MHz; 64MB Ram; 80MB hard drive space.

Contact: Macromedia 0800 169 8216
www.macromedia.co.uk