The new Adobe CS3 Suite is pretty awesome. As many of my designer and programming associates know I am a diehard Fireworks fan. The first art application I started using was Photofinish on Windows 3.1. This tool really had a lot to offer, nothing vector but you could get just about everything done with this tool. It had excellent gradients, smudge tool, cloning, it was packed full of goodies. I eventually converted to Photoshop around version 3 which I used until version 5. It was around this time I started experimenting with Macromedia Fireworks 3.0. It was totally vector based so it was easy for me to alter my current layouts and rapidly design aesthetically pleasing web sites . At this time Photoshop was still raster based. I fell in love with Fireworks, it was just easy, anything you wanted to do was very easy. After using Fireworks almost exclusively for a year or two I tried Photoshop 6 and was completely lost. They turned Photoshop into a vector / raster hybrid and I was slower than I was in previous version of Photoshop. Photoshop was dead to me. I occasionally pop it open when someone sent me a PSD, or I wanted to use a very specific Photoshop filter but now with the new Adobe Fireworks I can access PSDs, AI, EPS and other Adobe formats easily directly in Fireworks, its fabulous.
Then new Adobe Fireworks CS3 is excellent. Here are some new features that have been added:

Pages

Instead of using Layers and frames to isolate sections of your art work you can now use Pages. The pages are very similar to how you would think of a website. You can create a Master Page that has all the elements that are on every page, and then create specific pages for content that is only applicable to them. Cool new feature.

Symbols

The symbols have been greatly improved. Resizing symbols, breaking them up into small vector pieces has been vastly improved. They have even added UI symbols for Mac & XP so you can create mock ups of web sites or applications in Fireworks by using Textboxes, Submit Buttons, and other form fields that look like the native OS buttons.

Slide Shows

Previously you could create GIF animations in Fireworks which was great. But now you can create Flash slide shows complete with transitions without knowing a lick of Flash. Pretty neat.

File Interoperability

Illustrator files, Photoshop files, Flex elements can now all be opened in Fireworks and preserve the layers and graphical elements. You can even save your Fireworks files to PSD … woohoo!

Aero

Fireworks MX did not work with Vista’s Aero. Since I had Fireworks open majority of the time I was not able to enjoy all of the nice Vista window transitions. Now I can.
Adobe you made me proud! During the merger all the crazed Photoshop users were afraid they were going to merge Photoshop with Fireworks and the Fireworks users thought Fireworks would fizzle away. But, having experience in both Fireworks and Photoshop I knew you would do the right thing and keep them separate and equal. They are not the same app, they do have some overlap but they are both good at doing different things. Fireworks for rapid and effective website design, Photoshop for sitting in its box or when you need to remove some red eye out of a photo ;)