Yeah, that’s what was in the email they sent to me. I didn’t post it because I wasn’t sure of the T&C. Be that as it may, I was thinking the same thing… “worth a punt.” Their vid of Pulse on Blocs is compelling and the way you can make a section editable after the fact might be worth the price of admission.
I don’t see Blocs as something I’d use full-time, but for a quick site that needs CMS I’m considering it. I’d be interested to hear how you get along.
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Blocs doesn’t open HTML files, it has its own file format which contains entire sites in a single file. Blocs requires a specific HTML structure to work with files so it’s unlikely that you will ever be able to open a random site in it and start building.
As for shopping carts, Blocs doesn’t ship with a built in solution but you can use the HTML widget to embed additional code, you can also attach extra JS resources to page headers. The introduction of CMS’s such as Pulse and October CMS mean it’s now possible to add shopping cart functionality via a CMS plugin once your site is live, I’m pretty sure both offer shopping plugins. Please note: this functionality is not supported directly in the Blocs design environment.
And Brics, they are just your standard webpage elements, it’s a library that continues to grow, at some point in the future we may open this out to allow 3rd party brics, but right now it’s just what we provide.
Blocs is still very much a stand alone app, Pulse is just one of the 4 CMS’s we added support for, we have more on the way. So just to clarify this is not a special version of the app made just for Pulse.
As for the discount, Pulse offered Blocs users 25% off Pulse so we matched the deal for Pulse users wanting to Buy Blocs. Our discount for freeway users was not somthing we publisized out of respect for Softpress.
A workflow to consider: a lot of devs use Blocs as a springboard, get all the basics in place export and then fine tune in a code editor. This may suite some of your needs.
Don’t think of Blocs as a punt, I run a solid business and Blocs is one of the faster and most actively developed apps on the market in this space
Hope that helps
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@ Richard How are your new Blocs sites with Pulse integration coming along?
@Norm No offense intended with the “punt” comment. Quite the contrary, actually… Like many FW users I imagine, I’m spending quite a bit of financial resources and time resources on new design software. It’s overwhelming, but Blocs is certainly a contender. The short demo period is stressful, especially for those of us with other jobs besides web design. It’s nearly impossible to carve out sufficient time (within consecutive days) for testing a new app with such a short trial period. For me is, I’m most likely going to buy the software just to give it a good kick of the tires and if it doesn’t work out, with this new 25% off promotion, it’s a risk I’m willing to take.
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I’m currently building 2 sites with Blocs/Pulse and they’re doing great. The way Pulse is supported in Blocs is amazingly ‘simple’ from a users perspective. Ofcourse Blocs has it’s limits by being stuck with blocs, but hey … same also goes for all template based apps, and to be honest … I’d rather work with Blocs any day.
For more fancy stuff I’ll rely on one of CoffeeCup’s apps like Foundation Framer, Site Designer or Bootstrap Builder.
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In comparison, the top page of my existing Freeway site gets 97/100 for the Mobile score and 77/100 on Desktop, and that’s with images not being optimized (actually, mine are, just optimized for 144ppi retina). And the only other thing I have not addressed is Google Analytics, which won’t allow me to leverage browser caching – otherwise, I’d probably get 100/100 on Mobile, despite the fact my site isn’t Responsive!
Anyway, I am just curious as to your thoughts on website optimizations using Blocs. If someone moves to Blocs, are they going to see PageSpeed Insight scores shoot down into the 30’s?
Thanks,
James W.
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So the Blocs website was made with version 2.0 of Blocs I’ve been meaning to update it as would be a lot better now if I built it in 2.3.
Anyway , the score! So a lot of warnings refer to minifying the HTML, CSS and JS. Blocs can do this on export but with the Blocs landing page I opted not to minifying because I know some will want to inspect code quality. Exporting and minifying alone would probably bump the site into the 70s. Then switch gzip on and extend the cache ( server side stuff) and it’ll most likely pop into the 90s. I might switch those on actualy.
Anyway as you can see the Blocs landing page isn’t a great example for web optimisation but that’s partially intentially as I stated above regarding allowing folks to inspect source code. In general Blocs sites are pretty fast with good hosting and can be optimised to score much higher scores quit literally by switching minifying on when you export.
On a side note, really glad to see FreeWay return from the Flames. I look forward to what comes next.
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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:
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:
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:
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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I haven’t become a full-fledged Blocs user yet. But I must admit that back in 1999 what drew me to Freeway was its extreme ease of use. To me at the time, Freeway was as intuitive and easy to use on the Mac as MacPaint was in 1984. That’s why I have continued to use Freeway Pro all these years. In like manner, Blocs is extremely easy to use when it comes to building Responsive websites, but unfortunately Freeway is not.
Softpress is back from the netherworld, but we’ve seen nothing about how a new version may approach the building of Responsive websites more easily.
I first started thinking about Blocs in June 2016 when Softpress decided to throw in the towel. And although I was attracted to Blocs at the time, I still have a lot of sites built in Freeway to maintain. I promised myself at the time that when the next major new version of Blocs came out, I would start investigating. The reason I am so intensely investigating Blocs now is because version 2.4 is that “major revision” I was waiting for. Thankfully, Norm made his beta versions public, allowing me to dive in and test, and to make suggestions for improvement. I would strongly suggest that all Freeway users do the same. Why not try to make something better if you can? You never know if you’re going to end up using it.
The only major thing that’s missing from Blocks right now is a responsive “table creation tool.” I use tabular data a lot on my existing Freeway sites, and it’s easy to make old style non-responsive tables in Freeway. So I would want the equivalent feature and ease of use in any responsive web design tool I ultimately choose.
Anyone who wants to follow my thoughts on Blocs can just go over to the Blocs forum and see my posts there.
Look, I’ve been a Freeway user for a very long time and I would love to see Freeway present me with something that could rival the ease of use that Blocs offers when it comes to building Responsive websites. But I can’t just sit around waiting. I feel compelled to do something, and I don’t think it’s wrong to work towards making Blocs a better app. I would be happy to do the same if Softpress decides to make their betas public.
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Just to chime in here, It has been great having JDW putting forward ideas and pointing out the issues that still need a little work in the latest beta. I hope he continues to do the same, as he, has been extremely helpful and detailed with all of his feedback.
Blocs is very much a rough diamond but It’s getting there. Hopefully at some point it’ll be a good match for those looking for an alternative.
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Folks, I can only say positive things about Norm. He is active in the Blocs forum, responds to suggestions and bug reports quickly, and encourages suggestions. He moves at a rapid pace. It’s exciting to see what he’s doing with Blocs and how enthusiastic the Blocs community is in the forums there. Be sure to give the Blocs app a look and don’t be shy with your feedback.
Best wishes,
James Wages
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