Freeway crashes when opening

Documentation Freeway
1
If Freeway crashes when it opens, then you may have:

  1. The incorrect technical requirements for Freeway
  2. Not installed Freeway correctly
  3. A bad or damaged font on your machine
  4. Corrupt preferences
  5. A corrupt Freeway document
  6. 2006/7 Macs running Adobe Flash 13
1. Freeway 5 requires OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or above to run, and Freeway 5.5 requires OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or above to run. If you are using an older operating system than the ones listed, you will need to upgrade your operating system.

2. Make sure you drag the Freeway application icon into the Applications folder alias on the disk image, or to a folder of your choice on your machine. It cannot be run on the disk image itself (the disk image gets mounted on your Desktop and has a disk drive icon with a Freeway logo on it when opened). We recommend that you should unmount the disk image after installation to make sure you launch the application correctly.

3. Freeway reads through your fonts when it starts up. A damaged or corrupt font can cause it to crash when doing so. To check your fonts:
  • Quit Freeway and open the Font Book application (/Applications/Font Book).
  • Select All Fonts in the top left section, select a font in the column on the right and press Command-a to select all the fonts.
  • With all the fonts selected Control/Right-click on them and select Validate from the menu.
  • A dialog will appear and tests will be run on all your fonts.
  • Using the same application disable any of the fonts that it finds are bad by selecting them in the list of fonts (in the application, not the validate dialog) and clicking the "Disable selected fonts" button at the bottom of the window.
  • Restart Freeway, if it opens then you have found the problem.
  • Quit Freeway and enable some of the fonts you disabled to try and pinpoint the problem font.
Occasionally, validating your fonts won't fix the problem (Font Book is not a specialist font recovery utility), so you may need to try switching fonts off (or moving them to a folder outside of the Fonts folder) to see if you can track down and remove the rogue font(s). This can be done by using the 50% method of switching off (or moving) half of your fonts and then start Freeway. After that you can narrow down the good or bad list of fonts by half each time to eventually find the problem font.

Before doing the above, however, we recommend that you first switch off (or move) any freeware or cheap shareware fonts, as they are most likely to be the cause. Some very old fonts will not work correctly with later Mac OS versions because they do not have the required encoding (and these can cause Freeway to crash). If you have a very old version of a font, it might be that you will need to source a newer version.

4. When Freeway opens it reads through the preference files that it automatically created in your ~(Username)/Library/Preferences folder. These just let Freeway know what palettes you had open, what window layout you had and so on. If these become corrupt for any reason the Freeway may crash on startup.

To fix the problem you need to quit Freeway then "trash" your current Preferences files (so Freeway can create new, non-corrupt ones). To find your current Preferences files, type Shift-Command-g then enter (or paste) the following in the Go To Folder dialog:

~/Library/Preferences/

In this folder you will find the following files:

com.softpress.FreewayExpress.plist
or
com.softpress.FreewayPro.plist

and also

Freeway [your version] Pro Preferences
or
Freeway [your version] Express Preferences

Select both files and then drag and drop them to the Trash. Note that you must empty the Trash before you restart Freeway (because Freeway will find them again in the Trash).

5. If you are having problems opening a specific file then it may have become corrupt. This can sometimes happen when moving files from one machine to another or if a hard disk is on the way out. Try opening the .fwbackup file (called the .bak file in FW3.5) that Freeway stores automatically (alongside your Freeway document file) or another copy of your file if you have one.

6.Adobe recently released a new version of Flash which is causing various programs to crash when opened on Mac's that were created in 2006/7, which includes Freeway. Adobe have updated their Flash Player which fixes this issue. You can download the latest version of Adobe Flash here.

If you are still having problems with any of the above then please contact support with details of your problem.