Note: This article was written for a previous version of the site and is likely out-of-date.

When I was initially showing GridMaker to people, one of the first questions asked was whether it would work in Fireworks. Unfortunately Photoshop and Fireworks don't have completely compatible APIs (as far as I'm aware, things may have changed with CS3 but I couldn't find any suitable documentation) so a different approach was required. Fireworks doesn't seem to have a nice set of GUI functions like Photoshop's ExtendScript but it does allow embedding of Flash applications into the program itself as Command Panels.

I've never really used Flash before but ActionScript is pretty intuitive if you know JavaScript and ExtendScript (they're all based on the same language) so converting the code was pretty straightforward and seems to work nicely. I particularly like how well GridMaker looks embedded into Fireworks. I won't go into how to use it since it's exactly the same as the Photoshop version and it doesn't include any additional functionality yet (this is a serious possibility since Flash has far more flexibility for building user interfaces than ExtendScript).

Simply download the .swf file and place it in your "Fireworks\Configuration\Command Panels" folder, load Fireworks and GridMaker will be selectable from the Window menu. You can then choose to float it or have it docked in the toolbar

Download GridMaker for Fireworks (right-click and save link as, otherwise the swf will just load in your browser)