Norm,
I’ve not yet purchased Blocs but spent time testing v2.4b3 today. A couple hours ago, I sent a bug report to you pertaining to menus. I should add that I find it curious that even though hover-highlighting of text in the primary/main menu is enabled, there is no highlighting at all on the submenu items UNLESS I shrink the page width to get the 3 bars and then when I click the 3 bars I get all the contents of my menus to highlight as I hover over them with the arrow cursor. There seems to be a consistency problem here regarding highlighting.
I also am seeing some strange shifting going on as shown in this ScreenShot:
Other Feedback…
(1) How do I add a GOOGLE MAP in Blocs? In Freeway it’s easy. I just sketch an HTML box then add the Google Maps action. That action lets me assign Longiture and Latitude data, add an API key if I want, decide which overlays I want, and let’s me choose Language (e.g., Japanese). There’s yet another action in Freeway that allows me to add a Google Maps Marker, so our company name and address pops up above the marked location, for example.
(2) How do I add ANCHORS (e.g., clicking a link would allow one to be taken not only to a specific web page but also to a specific point on that web page)?
(3) Earlier in this FreewayTalk thread you told me the following about adding SITE SEARCH:
“As for search, I’d recommend just using the HTML widget and adding the Google search snippets via that.”
But how do I access that “HTML widget” (which would be for adding code alone) and then where do I find the tools in Blocs that allow me to add TEXT FIELDS, BUTTONS and such?
This is important to me because Freeway has long allowed me to implement search and form items without much fuss. To test out the Freeway-generated search field on my site, click in the bottom left corner of my site and type “alarm” and hit return to see the search results appear – which is what I would want to replicate in Blocs:
Freeway also allows me to use buttons for purposes other than search. For example, I can create a button with Freeway’s button tool, put it somewhere on the page, style the button with CSS, then assign a link to the button (e.g., to open a PDF, an overlay atop the existing page, to open a new page, to jump to a point on a page via anchor, etc.) Freeway also enables me to rather easily create a login page like this using FORM FIELDS and BUTTONS:
(4) Adding a YouTube VIDEO to a page is troublesome. I checked the Blocs documentation for “VIDEO” and it only talks about BACKGROUND videos, which is not what I want. I then see that video can be added using HERO (which unfortunately comes with a navigation bar along with the video) or GALLERY, which puts way to many videos on the page AND does not let me size the video to the dimensions I want. Am I missing something or is the video feature incomplete?
Also, how do I add MP3 AUDIO? I use Freeway to accomplish that now, putting that content in a page overlay. You can go to the following page on my site and click the model numbers to make that overlay appear:
https://visionsecurity.jp/en/sirens/index.html
(5) How do I easy add TABULAR CONTENT? Examples on my existing website:
https://kiramek.com/japanese/download.html
I’m talking about adding an Excel-like table. Freeway has a tool that does that, although it does not built the table entirely in CSS like it should. It uses [tr] [td] and so on. But at least Freeway gives me the ability to deal with tabular data. With Blocs, the only way I could do it is add a downloadable PDF to the page, but I would prefer to have a CSS3 table embedded in the page itself.
(6) How do I create “COLLAPSABLE CONTENT” in Blocs? In Freeway, I use an Action that allows me to click on something and then an overlay appears showing the content. But on a responsive site it would be better to do that as Apple does it on their site – you click a blue circle with a “+” in it to expand hidden content. For example, load this page and scroll down to the “Learn More” parts that show the blue circle, then click on the circle:
(7) A need for “FONT SETS” in Blocs…
I use Japanese all the time on the web and is why I questioned you about that in my opening post in this thread. You told me at the time to “just bolt on CSS.” Since the concept of Blocs is “make it super easy for anyone to use” it’s obviously best if the app can handle basic tasks like Font Sets. Freeway has long down that. Here’s a screenshot taken in one of my Freeway documents:
https://cl.ly/k1Ml/Image%202017-04-17%20at%202.52.15%20PM.png
After I created that “Gothic” font set, I then need only select text and choose “Gothic” from Freeway’s FONT popup (in the Inspector) and then Freeway creates the CSS file for me when I Preview or Upload. No need for me to do separate grunt work of creating a dedicated CSS file for Japanese.
It’s different for WEB FONTS, of course. But there is a Freeway Action that takes care of that rather nicely:
http://actionsforge.com/actions/caxton
But even without that Action I can just copy and paste the FontSquirrel-generated CSS into my Freeway document for whatever Web Fonts I wish to use. However, I almost never use Web Fonts for Japanese because there are thousands of characters versus the limited character set in English. Japanese fonts are usually 1MB or larger – too big to use as web fonts. That’s why Font Sets allow web designers to pick standard fonts we know are on every PC and Mac and then build that into the site.
As it stands now, if I type Japanese it looks good within Blocs and also when I preview in Safari, but in Blocs the font menu shows “Helvetica” which is not true since the Helvetica font contains no Japanese characters. That is very misleading and of course one will get unexpected results in browsers across different platforms as a result. That’s why the addition of Font Sets would potentially solve that problem.
(8) The only other thing that left me scratching my head was how to create a NEWS TICKER and how to display or hide content using a COOKIE. Both of those things appear on the top page of my VISION site here:
The ticker is found toward the bottom next to “TOPICS” and the overlay appears only once every few weeks based on the expiration of a browser cookie that I set in JavaScript.
CONCLUSION Despite the problems I’ve listed, there’s a lot to love about Blocs. And I say that as a veteran Freeway user. I like Freeway but it’s not as easy as Blocs to create a fully Responsive Site. No other web design app makes it as simple (for my poor brain) as Blocs. While testing v2.4b3 today, I went through my Freeway sites and picked out the MOST BASIC of needs and then tried to see if I could recreate such in Blocs. This post is my feedback to you regarding various problems I had during testing.
–James Wages
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