It would probably be fair to say that Fireworks is more orientated towards vector editing than towards editing bitmaps. As a result many users find that Fireworks is most effective when used in combination with a program with more powerful bitmap editing features such as Adobe Photoshop. The advantage of course of working with vectors, is that they can be resized with no loss of quality, whereas bitmaps tend to become either blurred or chunky ("jaggies") if rescaled.
One of the best things about Adobe Fireworks is that it incorporates a number of nice features that make it very easy to work with. For example, menus can be docked, collapsed and expanded within the Fireworks environment, allowing you to set up a clean and uncluttered workspace customized to match your own personal preferences. Likewise, the toolbar incorporates a variety of functions logically organized together - for example, related tools can be found on a submenu accessible by holding down the mouse pointer over a particular toolbar button.
Finally, as well as a flexible and logical user interface, Fireworks incorporates many powerful editing features. These include lightening and darkening tools, selection and rescaling tools, and the ability to slice and crop your designs.
