This is the sixth part of a series of reviews that will cover what is contained in the Adobe Creative Suite 3 (CS3) Master Collection. When Adobe released CS3 earlier this year, they not only released single version products, but also six separate suites of products. They are Design Premium, Design Standard, Web Premium, Standard, Production Premium, and Master Collection. You can go online to compare what is contained in each version. The goal of this series it to define what each product does and provide information of what the new version brings to the table.

What do you need to run Adobe Fireworks CS3 On Windows you need an Intel® Pentium® 4, Intel Centrino®, Intel Xeon®, or Intel Core™ Duo (or compatible) processor, Windows XP SP2 or Vista, on Mac, PowerPC® G4 or G5 or multicore Intel processor, Mac OS X v10.4.8 – 10.5 (Leopard), 512 MB RAM, 64 MB Video RAM, 1,024x768 monitor resolution with 16-bit video card, 1 GB hard drive space and DVD-ROM Drive.

Adobe Fireworks CS3 is a bitmap and vector graphics editor that was originally developed and distributed by Macromedia and was acquired by Adobe in 2005, It is available for both the Mac and Windows operating systems. Adobe Fireworks CS3 is the first version released under the Adobe banner and as such is now integrated into the Creative Suite group of products.

Macromedia Fireworks was first introduced in March of 1998 and later that year was released in an integrated studio with Dreamweaver. Many people thought that with the purchase by Adobe that Fireworks would suffer the same fate as Macromedia Freehand and fall by the wayside. After all there is Photoshop; which incorporated much of ImageReady, and Illustrator so what would be the need of Fireworks. Well it appears that Adobe Fireworks CS3 is being positioned as a website prototyping tool.

Since GoLive was replaced by Dreamweaver as Adobe's web development tool, Adobe Fireworks CS3 now has been refocused to become the tool to prototype website and web applications. Now you can use it to do the graphic design and layout that goes into creating a website before it gets into Dreamweaver. Since Dreamweaver and Fireworks have really been together from the start, this move was a natural. They now had to make friends with Photoshop and Illustrator which they finally did in CS3.