Sorry for starting a fresh thread, but man I’m frustrated today.
I’m an indie artist, I don’t have time to keep on top of changing web code standards but I like to maintain small, non-template-looking web sites for my projects. Years ago I used Adobe GoLive; when they killed that around the time Macs went Intel, I searched and searched and switched to Freeway. When Softpress apparently shut down, I searched and searched and switched to Adobe Muse, breaking down and finally subscribing to Creative Cloud so I could get it. Now I see — and somehow don’t remember ever being notified — that Adobe as end-of-life’d Muse and I need to move again.
I don’t want to search and search again. I randomly came here, and found that apparently Softpress is back from the grave, and is working on an all-new, 64-bit version of Freeway. Can it be true? My Muse sites can still be maintained for another year or so, hopefully. If Freeway 8? comes out this fall, I can easily bide my time again.
But if it doesn’t … I have to start from square one again, see if any other independent designer-focused web apps have cropped up in the meantime, or gulp consider switching to a template-based service.
I guess it comes down to … can I make myself trust a company that’s turned the lights off once before? Adobe has burned me at least twice now; will Softpress do the same? I’m really hoping and pulling for you guys; please, please don’t let me down! Good luck!
Please keep us posted!
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We are working on a 64-bit version of Freeway. Unfortunately, Apple have removed the 32-bit APIs that Freeway uses (instead of providing 64-bit replacements) so we’re rewriting Freeway from scratch. This is a major undertaking - but we’re making good progress, and we hope to have a public beta version ready later this year.
Softpress is a small company. We ran into financial problems in 2016, but Richard Logan brought the company back. I’ve worked on Freeway from the start (over twenty years ago) and it’s something I’m personally committed to.
Freeway is our flagship product. It’s not a sideline (as Adobe Muse was) and we’re not planning to drop support for it.
Jeremy
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Thanks for the quick reply! I didn’t mean to imply I thought this wasn’t a massive undertaking … I can imagine it is (I’ve got plenty of developer friends), and all the more reason I hope for the best you’ll be able to pull it off. It’s good to hear you’ve got someone guiding the company again.
Again, best wishes! I certainly love supporting smaller studios; if I can continue to find replacements for the other apps I use (Photoshop and Illustrator options look promising; InDesign I’m not so sure yet), I’d be happy to discontinue my CC subscription someday. XD
Looking forward to seeing betas and new releases!
-cooner
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Isn’t it cool that Softpress is back at it? I can’t wait until the new version of FW is out.
As far as InDesign–what do you use it for? I took over doing a newsletter and I found a great product called Swift Publisher. I’ve been very happy with it. It’s not 100% perfect, but it’s a small product, very Mac-like, and their support has been responsive. I mean, when I took over the newsletter, I took one look at InDesign and immediately thought that it didn’t look like a Mac app and it was WAY more complex than I needed for the newsletter. There were a couple of other apps that I looked at but for whatever reason I ended up with Swift Publisher.
Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer will be used to create my graphics for Freeway 8. Affinity Publisher for print stuff. A good way to be free of Adobe.
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Affinity Publisher is currently in beta. You can download and try it.
Yup, already downloaded it! I forget if that was before or after I posted here.
I was speaking more generally, tho … Aside from the Affinity apps there seem to be numerous options for photo and vector editing; third-party desktop publishing apps of professional quality are still few and far between. Really hoping Publisher lives up to expectations and can take that space! fingers crossed
Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer will be used to create my graphics for Freeway 8. Affinity Publisher for print stuff. A good way to be free of Adobe.
That’s pretty much exactly what I’m hoping my new workflow will be … Affinity Pro, Designer and Publisher replacing Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, and Freeway 8 replacing Muse. That’s 99% of my Adobe workflow right there.
Just anxious right now what with Publisher being in beta, Freeway not even in beta release yet, and still kicking the tires on Photo and Designer to make sure they’ll fit my needs. XD Here’s hoping!
If you do a lot of masking in Photo, then try the AFP 1.7 beta. It has fixed many of the problems with earlier versions. It’s also faster, though is probably slowed by debugging code. Stability is reasonable … though it’s good to have the Cmd-S habit frequently clicking away.
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On 6 May 2019, 8:34 pm, Cooner wrote:
third-party desktop publishing apps of professional quality are still few and far between.
I know this sounds really silly … but if you’re needs are not high-end, then Pages has slowly, very slowly crept back up to being a pretty good app with both its page-layout and WP modes. It now has master pages and personally, I use it for printing images up to poster size. It’s so easy … if you know how to workaround some of Apple’s hidden stuff. For example, it used to be impossible to get images into it, without them being converted to sRGB png. Then without any info whatsoever from Apple, it was able to use tiffs in any colour space. Huh?? I stumbled across this and it has since been my printing tool of choice. Very easy to be very precise with position and of course, you can just save your documents for future use, which is not something you can do in normal photo apps… It’s so typical of Apple.
On 11 May 2019, 10:20 am, Richard van Heukelum wrote:
On 7 May 2019, 8:45 pm, Baron Munchausen wrote:
It is still the best WYSIWG website editor.
It’s definitely not, but it comes close.
I leave the finer points of software merits to you experts. Many of us (I’m one such) are pretty low-tech in such things as coding, web design, etc. For me, since 2004 Freeway has provided a very user-friendly way to build a website that now reaches about 40K visitors monthly. Freeway’s ease-of-use, along with much advice on this forum from you internet friends, is allowing many of us nonprofessionals to be “webmasters” without having our own high-tech expertise.
Belight Software has recently come out with a vector design tool. https://amadine.com/ $19.99. Definitely worth a try. I’ve used quite a few of the products and they are first rate. Something to learn while we wait for Freeway to come back. I have been using RocketCake for websites for a while and it’s working pretty well, but I’ll be happy to return to Freeway once it’s ready.
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To make sure I understand the right thing to do before Fwy 8 arrives — we must stay with OS 10.14 Mojave (or earlier) until Fwy 8 is available, is that right?
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To make sure I understand the right thing to do before Fwy 8 arrives – we must stay with OS 10.14 Mojave (or earlier) until Fwy 8 is available, is that right?
Yes. Or at least have a separate disk or partition with Mojave installed so you can boot into that to use Freeway 7 and earlier. If you want to run Freeway 8 and 7 at the same time to compare how it handles things, that will need to be Mojave or earlier as well.
The current version of Freeway will not run in macOS 10.15.
We are rewriting Freeway as a 64-bit application - but because Apple have abandoned the 32-bit (Carbon) APIs that Freeway uses (instead of providing 64-bit replacements) we are rewriting it from scratch. This is a major task, even compared with previous transitions - such as the transition to from OS 9 to OS X, or the transition from PowerPC to Intel.
We are planning to release a public beta later this year, but it will take longer than that before the new version replicates all of Freeway’s current functionality and is able to read existing Freeway files.
Our advice is to keep an old system running macOS 10.14 (or earlier) for a transitional period, until you no longer need to run the current version of Freeway. This could be a virtual system (using Parallels or VMWare etc.) or it could be a separate disk or partition.
Our goal is to provide a complete replacement for the current version of Freeway - but it will take us a while to get there.
Jeremy
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I forget if that was before or after I posted here.