QuickFire is essentially Quicksilver for Fireworks. While it's easy to add a keyboard shortcut for your most-used commands, accessing the others still requires clicking through the Commands menu. QuickFire makes accessing these commands much easier: just launch QuickFire (with a keyboard shortcut, of course), start typing part of the command's name, then hit enter to run the matched command. Quick 'n' easy.

As you type, the letters you press appear in the upper-right of the dialog and the best match appears in the upper-left. Pressing delete will remove the last typed letter. A couple seconds after your last key press, the search times out and the best match fades from white to grey and the blinking cursor disappears; at that point, the next key you press starts a new search. This lets you easily change your search if you don't initially find what you want without having to delete everything you've typed.

Pressing enter executes the selected command and closes the dialog, while pressing escape closes the dialog without running a command. Pressing shift-enter runs the selected command but keeps QuickFire open. This lets you run several commands in a row. For instance, you might type "blmo" to match "Blur More" and then press shift-return to apply the blur filter to the selection several times.

QuickFire doesn't yet learn your preferred abbreviations for commands, but you can press the down arrow key to select one of the matched commands that didn't make it to the top spot.

Besides items in the Commands menu (which are marked with a "C" icon in the list), QuickFire also lets you quickly access:

Command panels

Typing a panel name like "Pages" will open that panel and bring it to the front if it's in a group.

Symbols

Any symbol files installed in the Common Library folder will be available for insertion. Typing the name of a symbol like "HScrollBar" and pressing enter is equivalent to dragging that symbol into your document from the Common Library. Different symbol types have different icons, though they all have the same color: G for graphic symbols, B for buttons, A for animations.

Auto shapes

Auto shapes that are available in the Shapes panel (like "Ruler") and those in the Toolbox (like "Rounded Rectangle") can be inserted into the middle of the document by typing their name.

Built-in menu commands

Parts of the Modify, Text and Filters menus are available in the command list. For example, the Text > Align > Right menu command is available as "Text Align Right", so typing "tar" will match that command.

In the QuickFire list, the names of commands and symbols are followed by the name of their parent folder, in grey. This lets you distinguish between commands or symbols with the same names that are stored in different folders, such as widget symbols in the "Mac" and "WinXP" folders.

If you want to use a keyboard shortcut that includes the spacebar (and who doesn't?), Fireworks won't let you, sadly. But the first time QuickFire runs, it will offer to add ctrl-shift-space as its shortcut, or you can select the "Add Keyboard Shortcut" item in the options menu. This will duplicate your existing shortcut file and add the new shortcut. You'll then need to either restart Fireworks or manually select the new shortcut file, as there's no way to do this from a command.

The first time QuickFire runs, it scans your Commands, Command Panels, Auto Shapes, Auto Shape Tools and Common Library folders to build up a list of available commands. From then on, QuickFire will re-scan these folders every 2 weeks, or you can click the options menu at the top-right of the dialog and select "Refresh Commands List" to force QuickFire to see newly installed commands or symbols.

Symbols

Note that are a couple of limitations in the Fireworks API that affect how QuickFire inserts symbols. The first is that once you've added a symbol to a document, you can't add a symbol with the same name from a different folder. Doing so will just insert another instance of the first symbol instead.

The second limitation is that adding a new rich symbol to a document doesn't maintain the symbol's "richness". In other words, if you add a CheckBox rich symbol, nothing will show up in the Symbol Properties panel when you select the CheckBox symbol. The only workaround for this is to first manually drag a rich symbol from the Common Library into your document, then use QuickFire to insert new instances of that symbol. These new instances will work correctly with the Symbol Properties panel. If there are existing instances of that symbol that you had inserted with QuickFire, select "Replace existing items" in the dialog that appears when you drag the symbol from the Common Library.

Note to Mac users

A bug in Fireworks CS3 and CS4 caused Flash dialogs to not get keyoard focus when they're opened. This means that QuickFire is nearly useless in those versions on OS X: after you press the keyboard shortcut to open QuickFire, typing on the keyboard doesn't work until you click the mouse in the dialog to give it keyboard focus, which defeats the purpose of quick keyboard access to commands. Fortunately, this bug was fixed in CS5, so if you want to use QuickFire on a Mac, you'll need at least version CS5.

Release history:

0.5.0

Further visual design tweaks. Added icons to differentiate between types of commands. Revamped how the command info is stored to avoid running into size limits for the Flash SharedObject. Offer to set a keyboard shortcut on first run.

0.4.0

Revamped visual design. Changed way typed search string and matching command are displayed. Current search times out after 2 seconds.

0.3.0

First public release. Added symbols and auto shapes to command list. Added option to set keyboard shortcut.

0.2.0

Some bug fixes.

0.1.0

Initial limited release.