Freeway v. Adobe's new Muse

Adobe’s Muse is making big waves for ease of use and friendly interface. Might there be any plans for Freeway Pro to update/improve it’s interface? Adobe’s subscription plan is stirring up quite a ruckus and I thought that it might be an opportunity for FW to gain some market share. Just a thought. Any others on this? Muse is nice but I’ve sworn off any form of installment payments, especially in my later years. Paying off the house took long enough, thank you very much.


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I agree, Muse looks a real competitor to Freeway.

I’ve just had a look at the Muse website. The intention, at some point in the future, is that Muse will seamlessly plug in to an Adobe CMS and have blog/news ability.

And the impression I get is that a lot of the functionality is built in. Where as FW relies a lot on plug in actions.

Mark


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I was an Adobe GoLive user for years… paid for every upgrade even though they were minor. Then Adobe killed it, and did not even offer upgrade pricing on the buggy Dreamweaver to the GoLive users they abandoned.

Real companies don’t treat their customers this way. I have been Adobe free for almost a year.


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I agree. I’ve always found trying to get help and support from Adobe to be a nightmare - whereas the support from Softpress and this site is fantastic and easy to access.

In fact I think Freeway is fantastic.

Mark


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I’m not crazy about the subscription plan. I guess the “app” will be on the web and you access it through your browser? I still like to have a program on my computer to work in.

I’m also a GoLive orphan! Adobe really hung us out to dry.

I think if Freeway had a CMS built in, it would go a long way. One of the things I’ve noticed more today than when we originally started doing sites, is that a lot of folks have lots of updates, and they like to do them themselves.

Bob


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I totally agree with everyones comments above. I too was a GoLive user. I even had professional training, and I too got dumped by Adobe and left with trying to figure out Dreamweaver, which is nowhere as intuitive as GoLive, IMHO.

Mind you I still use a lot of Adobe apps, but as far as I’m concerned Freeway Pro is what I use for web development. If Freeway offered a CMS, even as a paid option, I’d definately jump at that.

In fact, I personally don’t think that there is any problem with application upgrades every few years, not only to introduce new features, but to generate revenue for a company we all love—as long as the upgrades aren’t outrageously expensive. You know, like Adobe. :slight_smile:


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Wow, an easy CMS feature would solve a lot of issues. People back away from
me when I tell them it’s MAC only and it’s complicated to do their own
stuff. I’m all in favor of something that will help me keep customers, not
scare them away!
Thanks,
C.

On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 6:16 PM, RavenManiac email@hidden wrote:

I totally agree with everyones comments above. I too was a GoLive user. I
even had professional training, and I too got dumped by Adobe and left with
trying to figure out Dreamweaver, which is nowhere as intuitive as GoLive,
IMHO.

Mind you I still use a lot of Adobe apps, but as far as I’m concerned
Freeway Pro is what I use for web development. If Freeway offered a CMS,
even as a paid option, I’d definately jump at that.

In fact, I personally don’t think that there is any problem with
application upgrades every few years, not only to introduce new features,
but to generate revenue for a company we all love—as long as the upgrades
aren’t outrageously expensive. You know, like Adobe. :slight_smile:


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Hi all
Iv’e tried muse and thought “nope” its not ready and its not unique, there residence in its payment method and its always going to be in the shadow of its flagship application.
I love Adobe applications but not this one.
As far as easy CMS solutions goes, then there really are loads and loads. In reality the amount of work that would need to go into creating a CMS solution that could cover all areas and needs would be enormous. For example one project may require something as sophisticated as Expression Engine or Joomla or the next project may need to work within an asp.net environment like Umbraco, the third project may need nothing like that sort of heavyweight power so: Perch, miniCMS, Pulse or WebYep might fit the bill. The problem as I see it is, trying to accomplish this in one “easy size fits all type of application” is going to be a challenge of monumental proportions, and the fact that not one of the developers of these very successful cms systems claim to have that easy all singing and all dancing application that will work for everyone, probably means that its an idea thats not commercially achievable at the moment.

You wait next week apple or someone else will prove me wrong.

All the best max


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Hi All

Max is right there are different CMS solutions for different scales - but if Freeway had a lightweight easy to use ‘built in’ CMS then that would be AMAZING. Something like Max’s WebYep actions, built into the software.

Although what I’ve noticed is, clients are not only insisting on CMS but also a blog/news page - so the CMS would have to be able to handle this as well. Something like Perch built into FW would knock spots off Muse.

Mark


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Hi Mark
Yep I agree… the social media sector is now becoming the “must have” within any CMS, especially as google are now tweaking there algorithms to weight “visitor behaviour” and “new” relevant content with a higher degree of importance. Oddly enough I am testing out a webyep newblog/news page which includes a facebook like button that posts to a facebook wall. Which goes someway to achieve what google will want to see you can see my experiment here:
http://www.max-izzat.co.uk/FB/
It’s being tested now by some kind WebYep savvy people so look out for it in the near future.
Anyway I digress… being able to add functionality like social media add-ons like Face book RSS feed, Tweeting and Google plus are probably where we are all going to have to get familiar and comfortable with if we hope to keep up with the clients requirements.

kind regards max


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Re Freeway and CMS could Softpress make a start with Showcase?. This is being an application apart from Freeway. If an FTP upload was built in to it, site owners (in possession of a Showcase Application) could edit images and then upload to a folder within their site on the server.

I know of two applications which allow this - WOW slider and Jalbum. I have built a photographers site and all the albums are set up in Jalbum using one of the many ‘Skins’ available (Simple Viewer in this instance). The owner changes the photos and uploads them to folders within his site which then then appear on the correct page via an iFrame. Same can be done with WOW slider. (and the iFrame also allows WOWS jQuery to not upset Sriptaculous)

Could it be done with Showcase?

Richard


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Yes, a simple CMS to start. Something where the client can update text, images, PDFs.

Obviously, as soon as Softpress does this, people will be asking for something it can’t do, but I think it’s worth a shot at a simple start.

With all the help I got from Max and the screen casts from Dan, I still felt I was walking on eggshells putting together a VERY simple CMS portion to one site we did.

There just seems to be lots of little pieces that have to all work perfectly or nothing works.

Bob


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Well, first off don’t shoot me, but I liked Muse for what it was. The interface was simple to use and followed many of the workflow features of other Adobe products. However, this subscription and cloud service is nonsense. When they released v.1.0 they disabled the beta version making native Muse files inaccessible. I’m back to Freeway Pro, well I never left, just wanted to see what I could do with Muse.

It’s a great product to do rapid development, but under the circumstances that’s about it. This is what I did with Muse in a week, but worthless since I can’t back to it without subscribing. Twas like a short affair.

http://www.davidimanaka.com/hubodio4/index.html


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Well fast forward to 2013 and Muse has grown up very fast. v6.0 is out its user base is growing as well probably because it is available on Win and Mac. I see comments about CMS here and Muse has that where the client can make edits to the site and syncs up with your original file. The only flaw is at the moment it is tied to Adobe’s Business Catalyst Hosting. A lot of the new features start like that before they get it to work “or let it work” on other hosting platforms. Freeway could def use this feature and if Adobe’s team figured it out I’m sure Softpress team can.

Some other nice simple touches are its layers that work like other adobe apps, how easy it integrates with web fonts, the widget library and parallax scrolling controls.

Freeway and Muse do the same thing but work different and each has its strength and weakness like any application. Muse still lacks some super basics tho…LOL. No ordered or unordered list, no check boxes and drop downs for forms outside business catalyst.

In the end Freeway still wins because if you stop paying your new Abobe Subscription for all app’s fee your software stops working. They don’t even give you a grace period…lol


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Wow, an easy CMS feature would solve a lot of issues. People back away from
me when I tell them it’s MAC only and it’s complicated to do their own
stuff. I’m all in favor of something that will help me keep customers, not
scare them away!

With webyeb and max’s actions adding cms is relatively easy - even for a complete idiot like myself. Text and images can be added anywhere and from any pc connected to the internet - not mac only.


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Hi all seeing as this thread talks about a freeway integrated cms…
Well at the moment I am in the middle of rewriting/designing the webyep user interface which was in need of a complete overhaul… but what’s more important is I have been given permission by OBD to wrap the complete system up with the freeway actions… so the idea will be is you download the complete package and it will already have everything pre installed for freeway users… including redcator the commercial richtext editor (not tinymce or CKeditor ) a light-box already installed, a menu system within the long-text actions, pre-configured Freeway templates and a whole host of new stuff… I hope this will prove to be the missing link which will help people make the first forays into using a CMS that little bit easier.

i’ll keep you posted

max


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That sounds great, Max. I only have the one site so far using it and haven’t updated anything for fear of everything blowing up!

It will be great having everything integrated and all in one place.

Bob


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I use both and like using both, except I prefer Muse for making sites easily usable on mobile. Re your comment on no grace period - they have a 99 day grace period.
Just hoping we will have the ability for usability on mobile from FW soon. A website mentioned in an earlier thread as responsive does not work on phones.

On 22/08/2013, at 4:08 AM, Damion G email@hidden wrote:

Well fast forward to 2013 and Muse has grown up very fast. v6.0 is out its user base is growing as well probably because it is available on Win and Mac. I see comments about CMS here and Muse has that where the client can make edits to the site and syncs up with your original file. The only flaw is at the moment it is tied to Adobe’s Business Catalyst Hosting. A lot of the new features start like that before they get it to work “or let it work” on other hosting platforms. Freeway could def use this feature and if Adobe’s team figured it out I’m sure Softpress team can.

Some other nice simple touches are its layers that work like other adobe apps, how easy it integrates with web fonts, the widget library and parallax scrolling controls.

Freeway and Muse do the same thing but work different and each has its strength and weakness like any application. Muse still lacks some super basics tho…LOL. No ordered or unordered list, no check boxes and drop downs for forms outside business catalyst.

In the end Freeway still wins because if you stop paying your new Abobe Subscription for all app’s fee your software stops working. They don’t even give you a grace period…lol


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None of the glitzy features of MUSE matter if you are like me and HATE subscription models WITH A PASSION. No way. No how. I stand unaMUSEd. I shall not abandon my first love, Freeway.

With that said, there are some positives that anyone can glean from competitors apps to make Freeway better. Consider well that Apple never “copied” the work done at PARC. Rather, they gleaned a lot of the goodness they saw in brief intros at PARC and they made it better in the Macintosh 128k OS. In like manner, we ought to glean the good (whatever can be sufficiently altered to avoid patent litigation) and burn the rest.

The key to sticking with Freeway and understanding it though is the fundamental understanding that time in Oxford flows at a different rate than it does in the rest of the world. As such, many people lose patience, spout off in the forums here, then embrace some inferior product out of spite, only to find themselves either back here once again, or continuing to use that nutty competitor’s product so folks like me can’t say “I told ya so!”

So two things to remember:

  1. Never let up on your feature requires to SoftPress

and…

  1. Patience is indeed a VIRTUE. (Impatience is not.)

:slight_smile:

–James W.


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Can you offer a specific example of “spout off”? What inferior products exactly? Flux? Muse? Have you actually used these so-called inferior products? Do you know FW users who tried these products out of spite? You actually know that?

You seem to take other people’s opinions of FW personally yet you’re quick to criticize them for exploring their options. I understand you’re supportive of FW but you sound more like a petulant child. Belittling other’s choices because they don’t align with yours in an effort to bring more attention to your cause doesn’t make for a strong argument in your favor. Would you like being told, “I told ya so!” simply because you’re view differs from the next person?

C’mon James, you’re better than this, man. Aren’t you?

Todd

As such, many people lose patience, spout off in the forums here, then embrace some inferior product out of spite, only to find themselves either back here once again, or continuing to use that nutty competitor’s product so folks like me can’t say “I told ya so!”


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