Fin

Freeway
88

Part of this mastery is how Stacks isolates and ring fences each stack’s code into their own sections which stops one stck from stepping all over others on the same page. The downside is that it creates a lot, A LOT, of code for the page.

There is some truth in this, but as with all things, its improved over time. In order for Stacks to encapsulate each stack added to the page, there are 2 div wrappers added. Each stack is also assigned and ID so that the CSS and JS can be properly scoped. This ensures that stacks function independently on the page and there is no style overlap. As you said most users should not care about this at all.

The community of RapidWeaver add-on developers is larger than it has ever been. As with anything, if you are wise with whom you purchase from, you should have smaller & cleaner code output. I personally work very hard to produce the smallest and cleanest amount of code out there.

When Stacks 3 was released last year, it has some new APIs that allowed developers to ditch the 2 div wrappers. However, not even I am removing the wrappers from all of my products because they do indeed serve an important purpose. They are not just fluff. However, where ever its possible, I definitely try to not use them. In fact with my next major release of Foundation, you will be hard pressed to differentiate sites built with it from a site coded by hand!

As of right now, my current Foundation product still produces some of the cleanest RapidWeaver site out there. The reason for this is that it loads the entire Foundation open source framework once on the page. Then you can add as many of the Foundation stacks as you want on the page and it adds virtually zero overhead to the page CSS or JS.

This is why its been really taken the RapidWeaver community by storm. I have many users that used to hand code using the Foundation framework. However, they moved over because move sites using my add-on was so much easier and more fun to use. It also produce much leaner websites. As I said earlier, the next version will be even better.

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89

In terms of Responsive Site Designer from Coffee Cup… I purchased their Responsive Email Designer app last year with very high hopes for it. I did not like their builder interface at all. I find it very confusing to use. When I saw that they released RSD, it seemed to have the same interface as the Email designer had. Hopefully with time, they will improve it. I do think that with some UX tweaks it could be 100x better.

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90

Regarding “many add-ons to RapidWeaver that can do search,” that brings up another point of concern. There of course is the cost (now discounted, thank you) of RapidWeaver + Stacks + Foundation. But as has been said, that is not “all you need.” Want to add Search (and who doesn’t?), that’s an add-on. Want X-Y-Z, those too are add-ons.

One the one hand, this is great in theory. It would appear on the surface that RW + Stacks + Foundation + Add-ons can accomplish nearly anything the creative web designer seeks to do. But at what cost?

Many add-ons are not free, and it seems like moving to RapidWeaver may result in the web designer being nickel-and-dimed whenever they want to try something new. Or am I totally off-base on this?

/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-

Ernie Simpson and Thomas Kimmich,

You both are Freeway veterans and Responsive web page design wizards. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I would still very much appreciate hearing your feelings about RapidWeaver + Stacks + Foundation and despite having all that available why you have stuck with Freeway all this time. Is it that you just grew accustomed to Freeway and didn’t want to try something new? Or did you in fact try RW + Stacks and find a barrier (like Tim Plumb) that prevented you from switching to it?

Now that Freeway is not more, this is a topic all of us are surely pondering, not just me.

Thank you,

James Wages

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91

/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-

Ernie Simpson and Thomas Kimmich,

You both are Freeway veterans and Responsive web page design wizards. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I would still very much appreciate hearing your feelings about RapidWeaver + Stacks + Foundation

I don’t have any.

In fact, I’ll never use any “fiddle and hope” application anymore. Freeway taught me all I know. And that’s way enough for going an entirely different route.

I can’t judge Rapidweaver.

It was one coming into question when I started web design 8 years ago. I quickly realized, that everything needs to be purchased on plus of the basic core. Furthermore, those “stacks” are adding an incredible bunch of inline styles to the DOM just for positioning purposes. It is bloating the head with many browser requests (many css files). Perhaps it’s possible to concatenate them to one?

But this doesn’t necessarily means it’s bad. It’s simply not part of my plan.

and despite having all that available why you have stuck with Freeway all this time. Is it that you just grew accustomed to Freeway and didn’t want to try something new? Or did you in fact try RW + Stacks and find a barrier (like Tim Plumb) that prevented you from switching to it?

I found an incredible modern workflow. In mid of this is sitting Freeway as an important part - to be pedant:
The core element.

In Freeway I manage the content and its positioning (Structure). Furthermore the very basic styling such as typography and colors. All the rest - such as fancy styles (shadows, rounded corner :slight_smile: … you know what I mean) and the functions (JavaScript) is coming from an external library. All this is managed via CodeKit and an external CodeEditor. All files are placed on dropbox and giving me the chance for somehow live development.

This all means, that I go on with Freeway! I expect it being alive the next 2 years. Enough time to find an alternative (which I already have somehow (51% tendency towards).

You see that there isn’t mach space for Rapidweaver. And Rapidweaver would even force me recreating all my stuff onto their platform. A no-go!!! But as already said: This doesn’t necessarily mean RW as a bad application.

Cheers

Thomas

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92

As some already mentioned the upcoming Foundation Framer of CoffeeCup (they offer already Responsive Site designer, but Foundation Framer must be much better ) sound very promising to me. They have excellent support, which is important to me. I try to get a beta version as soon as possible.

Responsive Foundation Framer | CoffeeCup Software https://www.coffeecup.com/foundation-framer

Still in beta, but hopefully coming soon.

All the best,
Hanna

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93

Thomas,

Thank you for your opinion. I will assume for now that Ernie Simpson shares your reasons for having remained faithful to Freeway all these years.

/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-

sonjanna,

The only video I could find for CoffeeCup “Foundation Framer” is the following, and I must say it sure doesn’t look nearly as easy to use as what Joe Workman shows in his videos.

But again, my main concern with RapidWeaver is how much I am going to be nickel-and-dimed for every little new thing I want to add to my sites build on that platform.

Best,

James Wages

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94

Hi James,
I was looking at your comment below and thinking that I’d always had the assumption that if you developed with RapidWeaver that you’d need to be prepared to purchase new stacks or themes to achieve the sort of things you wanted. However that was nothing more than an assumption.

What I’ve done is to pick the first site from the RapidWeaver gallery and see what stacks and other bits the creator has used to build the site.

From my limited knowledge of pulling these sites apart here’s my shopping list for this site;
http://rapidweavercommunity.com/gallery/chet-j-collins

RapidWeaver 7 - $99.00
Writer Theme - $29.00
Stacks 3 - $49.95
Font Pro Stack - $49.95
Foundation Stack - $59.95*
Houdini Stack - $4.95
Responsive Layout Stack - $19.95
Useful Stack - free

— Total cost in USD - $312.75

Header X Stack - £5.99**
True Retina Stack - £6.99**
Button Press 2 Stack - £6.99**
Responsive Shim Stack - £5.99**

— Total cost in GBP - £25.96**

Converted cost to USD - $33.69

Final cost (roughly) - $346.44

Obviously for an individual site the final cost could well be prohibitive for some users but you’ll obviously have to consider that you can use all of these resources on other projects as well as receiving support from their authors. I’d also imagine that, like Freeway, you could ‘get out and push’ and use markup items to achieve most of these effects rather than plonk down the reddies for the stacks which would bring the cost down considerably.

As I mentioned before RapidWeaver has a whole eco system around third party products (themes, stacks, training, hosting etc) and very much like WordPress plug-ins you’ll find several solutions to pretty much anything you’ll need with what appear to be most at the commercial end of the market.
Regards,
Tim.

  • The Foundation Stacks are available in different sets and I can’t tell from the source code which package the author is using. For the sake of argument I’ve chosen the cheapest option.
    ** I couldn’t easily find the UDS price for these stacks but have converted the GBP price to USD using the XE.com daily conversion rate.

On 11 Jul 2016, at 10:16, JDW email@hidden wrote:

But again, my main concern with RapidWeaver is how much I am going to be nickel-and-dimed for every little new thing I want to add to my sites build on that platform.

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95

I will assume for now that Ernie Simpson shares your reasons for having remained faithful to Freeway all these years.

Just leave me out of it you stubborn ginger nutter.

Quit trying to bait me into replying to your stupid discussion. Freeway is not my religion or my girlfriend and I quite resent your assumptions on my part.

I used Freeway to generate a specific code-outcome, that’s all. Instead of using it to avoid learning any code, I embraced using it specifically to learn how websites are made. I actively encouraged others to do the same.

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96

Gentlemen! You can’t fight here – this is the War Room!

Walter

On Jul 11, 2016, at 11:24 AM, The Big Erns email@hidden wrote:

I will assume for now that Ernie Simpson shares your reasons for having remained faithful to Freeway all these years.

Just leave me out of it you stubborn ginger nutter.

Quit trying to bait me into replying to your stupid discussion. Freeway is not my religion or my girlfriend and I quite resent your assumptions on my part.

I used Freeway to generate a specific code-outcome, that’s all. Instead of using it to avoid learning any code, I embraced using it specifically to learn how websites are made. I actively encouraged others to do the same.

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97

On 11 Jul 2016, 3:27 pm, waltd wrote:

Gentlemen! You can’t fight here – this is the War Room!

Walter

I think they were after our bodily fluids Walt.

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98

Thank you for your kind reply, Tim. That’s what I was thinking about the overall cost and is one reason why I have always been concerned about using RapidWeaver to get something done.

Mr. Simpson, thank you for your feedback as well. Understood.

Walter, if “this is the War Room,” why can’t we “fight here”? :wink:

Gingerly yours,

James Wages

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On Jul 11, 2016, at 8:00 PM, JDW email@hidden wrote:

Walter, if “this is the War Room,” why can’t we “fight here”? :wink:

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100

Walter, thank you for the link. I learn something new every day.

Hopefully I won’t anger you as well by pointedly asking you this question, but what is your opinion on intuitive web design options for Freeway users “who don’t see the world as code”? (That may be a challenging question in light of how you see the world as code, but I value your opinion and is why I ask.) You too have been in the Freeway camp for decades. It’s obvious you never left for a reason, despite all the web design software out there.

Thus far, we’ve heard people in this thread pitch MUSE (Adobe… subscriptions… surely they must be kidding!), software from a Coffee Cup (but I don’t drink coffee, nor have I been impressed by the video I saw of it), and a tommy-gun worth of posts pitching RapidWeaver (which looks like a small loan may need to be taken out to pay for a decent site to be built, even with the discounts given to Freeway users in this thread).

Thanks,

James Wages

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101

I’ve been teased by a number of different new apps lately – I put good money into that Kickstarter a while ago, only to have the app get bought and sunsetted by Invision, who already have their own Web-based prototyping app.

It’s frustrating. On the one hand, it seems pretty easy to put a wrapper over WebKit and make a Web design app out of it. There are tons of examples already, more coming it seems daily. But to have any of these work as Freeway does – a site at a time, rather than a page at a time – seems to be too much of an ask.

Freeway was and is a special snowflake, and I don’t see anyone else reaching for that particular set of features. Perhaps the market for that sort of application is smaller than you or I would like to admit.

As for my own needs, Freeway stopped being useful for the kind of work I do over 10 years ago, and while I have been able to do creative work with nothing but a text editor, I do miss the direct manipulation and intuitive “messing around” of the old days. I have to work harder in my left brain to get a result than I would like, if I’m honest.

In my dreams, Freeway would have grown with me, from PHP to Ruby, to whatever comes next. Every time a new version was in the works, I would put my wish list out there and make it known what I needed. Softpress seemed to keep chasing the beginner I once was, rather than the pro I became under its tutelage.

Walter

On Jul 11, 2016, at 9:18 PM, JDW email@hidden wrote:

Walter, thank you for the link. I learn something new every day.

Hopefully I won’t anger you as well by pointedly asking you this question, but what is your opinion on intuitive web design options for Freeway users “who don’t see the world as code”? (That may be a challenging question in light of how you see the world as code, but I value your opinion and is why I ask.) You too have been in the Freeway camp for decades. It’s obvious you never left for a reason, despite all the web design software out there.

Thus far, we’ve heard people in this thread pitch MUSE (Adobe… subscriptions… surely they must be kidding!), software from a Coffee Cup (but I don’t drink coffee, nor have I been impressed by the video I saw of it), and a tommy-gun worth of posts pitching RapidWeaver (which looks like a small loan may need to be taken out to pay for a decent site to be built, even with the discounts given to Freeway users in this thread).

Thanks,

James Wages

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102

This is indeed a bit of a shock! I can’t say that I was one of those who seen this coming. I actually felt that the whole freeway project was beginning to embrace a next stage of significant development and I was investing more time on it as a tool with even greater potential for all my web design needs.

Its a particularly unwanted addition to the current sense of chaos and confusion which is afflicting the world.

This must be so very tough for those employed at Softpress. I hope that they have other opportunities come their way.

Like many others, Freeway gave me a way in to web design, with all the associated possibilities that emerged for work etc.
I am so very grateful to all who offered support and advice. Delta Dave, Walter and Big Ern in particular.
Like everyone else I shall have to take stock of where this leaves me in terms of the future. Thomas mentioned maybe another couple of years before there would be a need to leave Freeway behind. Who knows?

Will this forum become the saloon in the middle of a desolation after the gold rush? What is there at the end of a freeway?

Whilst the ramifications of the closure of Softpress will unfold I guess the concern is for support now for those in the middle of developing projects. It does leave many hanging at various stages of progress. Those transitioning form various versions of Freeway, those transitioning sites to responsive design and those trying to resolve niggles with existing work. I guess the fear for many may be that they may have nowhere to turn for support should this forum lose its focus.

There is a lot to take on board as a consequence of this end. Much of what has been said here on this forum has been enlightening.

I hope that this community can still continue to function and find a resolve, a new centre to build around.

All the very best to all at Softpress.

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103

This post triggers a lot of thoughts and memories for me. Mostly that I’m sad to see that Freeway will never become what many of us hoped it would. I thought that once Softpress started writing the Cocoa apps (Exhibeo and Chroma), that maybe that knowledge would allow them to modernize Freeway. I know that SP aren’t Apple, but I had hoped that Apple’s model of rewriting Classic apps from the ground up would be taken by Softpress. Maybe they could have started by writing a basic web design app aimed at people who just wanted to make simple web sites using WYSIWYG. Output clean code and work very simply. Then build the new version of FW on that - Freeway X, perhaps. FWX would have the simple stuff but could do the things power users needed too, the things Walter mentions below, as well as be a modern program that could grow with the times.

Alas, it’s not meant to be. One can hardly blame Softpress, really. I can picture it now. While they are working on FWX, the web keeps moving. It’s a never-ending race and that costs time and money. Today it’s “responsive” but who knows what it will be tomorrow or the next day. Heck, that’s a big reason I got off the treadmill. I got tired of chasing technologies that were out before I figured out the last one.

Yet I still have web sites that I work on and expect to have to some degree for as long as I’m around. When/if FW stops working, I’ll need a replacement and I don’t know that any of them will make me as happy as FW did. Even if something does, I’ll miss this community we created around it.

On 12 Jul 2016, 1:52 am, waltd wrote:

It’s frustrating. On the one hand, it seems pretty easy to put a wrapper over WebKit and make a Web design app out of it. There are tons of examples already, more coming it seems daily. But to have any of these work as Freeway does – a site at a time, rather than a page at a time – seems to be too much of an ask.

Freeway was and is a special snowflake, and I don’t see anyone else reaching for that particular set of features. Perhaps the market for that sort of application is smaller than you or I would like to admit.

As for my own needs, Freeway stopped being useful for the kind of work I do over 10 years ago, and while I have been able to do creative work with nothing but a text editor, I do miss the direct manipulation and intuitive “messing around” of the old days. I have to work harder in my left brain to get a result than I would like, if I’m honest.

In my dreams, Freeway would have grown with me, from PHP to Ruby, to whatever comes next. Every time a new version was in the works, I would put my wish list out there and make it known what I needed. Softpress seemed to keep chasing the beginner I once was, rather than the pro I became under its tutelage.

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104

Hi Joe,
Why does the community side of things need to stop? Softpress will go away, FreewayTalk will too but the users here can always transition to a new home. I’m keen to see the FW community supported in some way going forward as I’m sure there will be people who will want to carry on with the application and could do with a friendly ear to bend about their experiences.
Regards,
Tim.

On 12 Jul 2016, at 14:26, Joe Muscara email@hidden wrote:

I’ll need a replacement and I don’t know that any of them will make me as happy as FW did. Even if something does, I’ll miss this community we created around it.

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105

Hi all… if I may chime in, I agree with Tim that if its possible to continue with a FW forum, I would really appreciate that… I will continue using FW app

I don’t see any reason why I cannot continue using what I have learned creating my own responsive sites from scratch with the wonderful help from the Softpress and fellow users… thx

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106

On 12 Jul 2016, at 3:52, Walter Lee Davis wrote:

It’s frustrating. On the one hand, it seems pretty easy to put a
wrapper over WebKit and make a Web design app out of it. There are
tons of examples already, more coming it seems daily. But to have any
of these work as Freeway does – a site at a time, rather than a page
at a time – seems to be too much of an ask.

Freeway was and is a special snowflake, and I don’t see anyone else
reaching for that particular set of features. Perhaps the market for
that sort of application is smaller than you or I would like to admit.

A very interesting - and to the point - point.

It is probably a side effect of the fact that Freeway uses its own
proprietary file format, where each site literally is a single file
(from Freeway’s point of view) - it is only when the actual HTML is
generated that it becomes single pages. That Softpress chose that
approach, again, is is a sideeffect of the focus Freeway always has had
giving users a free option with regard to publishing a peace of text as
HTML vs as graphics - which probably is another very unique thing about
Freeway.

Since Webkit operates on the endresult - the site, th editor part must
somehow glue it together again in order to give the user the same site
control as Freeway does. It sounds like a backward way of putting
together a site design app …

If there exists a Web design programme that uses a single file for the
entire site, then perhaps we will see similar features … It did not
need to be a proprietary file format - it could be a single file XML
document which parted into single page sections and displayed, to the
users, as single pages … (In a way, CMS-es, such as Wordpress, has
some of these sideffects/features - except that CMS-es tend to focus on
items - article etc - rather than pages.)

As for my own needs, Freeway stopped being useful for the kind of work
I do over 10 years ago, and while I have been able to do creative work
with nothing but a text editor, I do miss the direct manipulation and
intuitive “messing around” of the old days. I have to work harder in
my left brain to get a result than I would like, if I’m honest.

In my dreams, Freeway would have grown with me, from PHP to Ruby, to
whatever comes next. Every time a new version was in the works, I
would put my wish list out there and make it known what I needed.
Softpress seemed to keep chasing the beginner I once was, rather than
the pro I became under its tutelage.

Allthough I am far from your level as a Web crafter, you have some
points.

leif halvard silli

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107

dammit, freeway was the tool to build a decent website wich generates enough customers for me… now i’ve to find something else in the future…

joe and the others… thanks for the support and the great software and good luck with the new careers

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