Gentlemen (Ernie, Walter, Thomas & grantsymon):
Thank you for your feedback, and special thanks to Ernie for your effort on that amazing Freeway document. I would never have been able to intuitively figure out such a complex layout on my own.
At this point, I must say that despite all the merits, the fact remains that Freeway needs serious improvement for it to inspire my creativity. Have a look at what Ernie put together within Freeway (think like a “right brain” creative visual designer when you ponder it):
http://cl.ly/36121m373I2g/Image%202016-05-23%20at%209.17.25%20AM.png
Note that I have the top object named “css-table” selected.
At a glance, your right brain immediately tells you, “this is about the furthest thing from WYSIWYG I’ve ever seen!” And to my brain, it’s like using a DOS or CP/M word processor rather than MacWrite on a Mac. It’s a night and day difference, and that is no fault of Ernie or any of you Responsive proponents. It is a fault of Freeway insofar as Freeway was design to be a DTP tool with significantly more WYSIWYG appeal than what a Responsive site demands.
Now have a look at my existing site (the page that contains the item which Ernie so kindly rebuilt entirely with CSS positioning) within Freeway:
http://cl.ly/37090B1j3N2p/Image%202016-05-23%20at%209.20.57%20AM.png
It looks in Freeway almost exactly how it will appear in Preview or the browser. That method of design frees my mind to focus on how I want the page to look, regardless of how “dated” some feel that website is.
And with regard to my site being “dated,” yes indeed it is. I designed the basic layout several years ago. And except for Retina optimizing it in the last several months, the basic layout remains the same. And yet, despite being dated, it is still usable. I view it on my iPad all the time in both portrait and landscape views and never have a problem. That doesn’t mean I seek to retain the existing design forever, but it does mean that unless I have a more INTUITIVE, right-brained means of moving the layout to Responsive, I will, as I have been, stick to the existing design.
Regarding the claim that my FAQ page doesn’t show up on mobile, that’s note true. Here is a screenshot from the iOS simulator of an iPhone 6S:
http://cl.ly/2X0L2q2R3p0j/Image%202016-05-23%20at%209.42.36%20AM.png
My wife has an iPhone and so do people in our office, and we have confirmed long ago that the content appears just fine. Furthermore, I have people in our office check our site with Android devices too, and the content does display. So perhaps something was wrong with your test or I was upload the site at the time you tried to access it. (I did work on that FAQ page very recently.) Here’s the URL of that FAQ page:
JAPANESE:
http://www.visionsecurity.jp/jp/faq.html
ENGLISH:
Some of you have lost hope that Freeway will ever evolve into something more modern, so do you do best with the existing tools. And I must say, I am very impressed with your skills. But please remember that not everyone is Walter. Not everyone is Ernie. Not every one is Thomas. And, even though you feel yourself inferior in some respect to those gentlemen, grantsymon, the fact is you were able to follow in their path, study up, and achieve some of the success they have achieved. I am humbled by the brilliance of the 4 of you. I have every respect for you. Indeed, I pay homage to each of you. But that does not mean I can or will be like you.
I remember years ago when I was in high school and college getting frustrated with my parents for not having the same knowledge or design to study up on technology as I did at the time. As the years went by, I acquired more patience with them, and as more years went by, I came to understand them.
When you have a young and “genki” (as we say in Japanese) brain given to analytical thought, you can with a little study become a master of the existing “Responsive design” in Freeway. But what brought me to Freeway back in 1999 was the opposite of that. I was captivated by the SoftPress catch phrase, “For those who don’t see the world as code.” Take note of all the Extended hacks one must perform on my rather simple page element (within Ernie’s design) to hold that object together, and then take note of the fact it looks like a horrible nightmare in Freeway’s PAGE view. It looks nothing like it appears in the browser.
The same is true when writing code. You write code that will never be seen by the average user. Some people have the mind to be a coder, while most people do not. Most people simply rely on the skills of the coder to present the digital in a more analog and human way. The CSS Positing in Ernie’s design is Digital whereas my dated design approach is Analog.
To those of you who have mastered Responsive, Freeway’s Page view is not scary at all. It’s normal to you. In fact, you may even like it now. Maybe you even want to marry it. But I have not come to that point in my life, and honestly I doubt I ever will. I want to see, by and large, something in the Page (design) view that will appear very close to that in Preview. The closer to WYSIWYG I get, the faster my creative juices flow. The more I am forced to focus on a design that looks nothing like the final output, the less enthusiastic I am about continuing the design.
Perhaps some of you would like to mock me or slap me in the face at this point, and that’s fine. But I am not criticizing any of you. Again, I am humbled by your ability to work with Freeway’s toolset – a toolset that really wasn’t designed to accomplish Responsive layout. But I still feel that if Freeway could evolve the tools to make Responsive design SIGNIFICANTLY easier for stupid people like me, that would appeal to a very broad audience of people indeed. For truly, most people are not as mentally adept as the 4 of you gentlemen.
Thank you for your time and kind assistance.
Sincerely,
James Wages
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