Fireworks' strongest new prototyping ability is its true support for multipage documents. The pages can vary in pixel dimensions, you can create links between pages, and you can even share layers across multiple pages. I'm glad to see this feature, which is a huge improvement over the clunky old workaround of using frames to create a crude approximation of multipage support.

The new Common Library is a repository for Fireworks' rich symbols—design and interface components for Web-site designs that you can edit and reuse. It's easy to add symbols to the Library, where they can be reused and even shared among coworkers for consistent design. Included in the prebuilt rich symbols that ship with the program are graphics and buttons in the style of Windows XP and Mac OS X. I was disappointed that it doesn't ship with those for Windows Vista, however.

Another of Firework's great new content creation tools is the ingenious new nine-slice scaling feature. What is nine-slice scaling, you ask? It's a solution to a common problem. In general, without this ability, if you take a rounded rectangle button and scale it horizontally, you stretch every part of the button equally, and the rounded corners will be unattractively out of proportion. Nine-slice scaling cuts objects into a grid of nine squares, which lets you manipulate individual "slices" of the image, such as the parts that fall in the slices that run from 1 to 9 on a number pad. You can specify which slices are allowed to stretch and which should stay frozen. If you stretch horizontally, only the slice made up of the central vertical squares (corresponding to keys 2, 5, and 8) stretches. The other squares don't and therefore retain their original proportions. If you're having trouble visualizing this, check out this visual explanation on Adobe's site. This nifty feature shows up in Illustrator CS3 as well.

Adobe Fireworks isn't the sort of program that's designed to "wow" you with knockout features. It's much more utilitarian in nature, and given its integration with the rest of the CS3 apps, it probably makes more sense to buy Fireworks as a part of the Creative Suite than to buy it on its own. Either way you purchase it, however, I'm sure you'll agree that Adobe continues to impress with this useful and impressive tool.