Look, Thomas is a big boy and can take it. Believe me, I’ve taken a lot in forums where no one stood up for me at all, and I chinned up and moved on.
People are highly opinionated and passionate about this subject. And being somewhat of a libertarian-leaning individual myself, I say LET FREEDOM REIGN. Sometimes the tough and insensitive comments make us think a little harder. Steve Jobs did that. People hated him for it. But look what his insensitivity accomplished.
I myself like Thomas and when through his videos. I understand and appreciate his GridMeister approach to Responsive sites in Freeway. And thank you, Thomas, for taking the time to make those videos. It doesn’t matter to me if you sell access to them or not. You did the work, why not reap the rewards?
BUT…
And here the crux…
IT SHOULD BE EASIER.
That is no fault of Ernie, Thomas, Walter or anyone else here in these forums. Okay, yes, it is somewhat the fault of SoftPress (and being a lover of Freeway since 1999 and a lover of the good people at SoftPress, I’m allowed to boldly say that). But the great thing about FAULTS is that they can, given time and personal drive, be CORRECTED.
SoftPress must transform Freeway back into “The App for the Rest of Us.” You know, “For those who don’t see the world as code.”
I want SoftPress to take this nightmarish design approach:
http://f.cl.ly/items/442T1L3g163u0o3d2h2x/Image%202016-05-23%20at%209.17.25%20AM.png
And transform it to this one:
http://f.cl.ly/items/053i0p1u250p2A270t3w/Image%202016-05-23%20at%209.20.57%20AM.png
In other words, I want the ease of table-based design, affording me, in Page view, a rather close WYSIWYG approximation of the final output, yet producing a fully Responsive Site (if I so choose) and with CSS Positioning only. All the HACKS, CODE, ACTIONS, etc. we use now must be used by the Freeway AI. It’s 2016, folks. Software should be smart enough now to do these basic things. It’s not like we’re asking it to solve global poverty or make each person on earth rich. We’re talking about a few simple objects on a silly web page, for goodness sake.
Yes, yes, yes. I know. “It takes a lot more CODE than you think to put an app like that together.” Sure it does. But do accomplish that is to put a dent in the universe. To do that is to achieve GREATNESS. Why not try?
I’m going to say it again, I don’t condemn Ernie, Thomas, Walter, Richard, Grant or any other of you good people who are, in my humble opinion, TRUE GENIUSES when it comes to making Responsive Design work in Freeway 7 Pro. It’s simply amazing. To me, it’s like painting the Mona Lisa in a pitch black room filled with toxic gas. You’ve achieved what I myself can only dream of doing. Bravo, and congratulations to all of you.
But that sincere praise from my heart in no way, shape, or form says “Freeway has come a long way and now makes it rather easy to create a full Responsive website with CSS Positioning.” No. Again, I’ve been a Freeway user since 1999 who also was a Mac 128k user in 1984. I know the difference between a DOS word processor and MacWrite. I know how easy it is to create table-based layouts in Freeway versus the totally non-WYSIWYG approach to Responsive.
Even those of you who rather enjoy using Freeway right now to create Responsive websites shouldn’t beat on me too hard for wanting something better. Imagine if there had been no Steve Jobs or people like him who demanded something better. Where would we be today in terms of personal computing?
Like I said earlier, RapidWeaver with Stacks is rather impressive to me. But it’s a cluttered interface when you add all the basic stacks necessary to accomplish what you can do in Freeway out of the box. It’s just that RW + Stacks makes it easier in some ways than Freeway. And yet, RW + Stacks fails because its overly complex to the end user. You have to sit for hours figuring out what new stacks you need to add (and pay for), then install them, then fail, then try another stack, and so on. I want the SoftPress team to consider that in their own NEXT GEN edition of Freeway and make it better.
Again, I want to design a website in Freeway like I do when I approach a table-based design. WYSIWYG. But I want the option to make the output Responsive. And I want the option to make content CSS Positioned if I so choose.
This may be hard for SoftPress to code, but I doubt any of you would say “it is IMPOSSIBLE.”
Where there’s a will there’s a way. And I am desperately trying to stimulate that will in everyone.
Best wishes,
James Wages
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