[Pro] Responsive Woes

Freeway
61 
"I would say to James, as I once counselled my students, 
don’t keep looking for reasons to say something is impossible."

Richard L., that is precisely what I am saying about improvements to Freeway. We don’t need to keep looking for reasons to say “improvements to Freeway are impossible.”

Thank you for your detailed post though, and for screenshots in Freeway of your sites and links to your sites. I would agree that your design approach is a very close approximation in Freeway to the final output. But most of what I’ve seen in Responsive Design in Freeway is quite different in Page view than Preview. And I would cite my earlier screenshot as an example of that:

http://f.cl.ly/items/442T1L3g163u0o3d2h2x/Image%202016-05-23%20at%209.17.25%20AM.png

I think we both can agree that the designs we have in mind must be toned down or altered to fit within the constraints of our preferred design tool, Freeway, not merely within the design constraints of the web. But I want to free my mind a bit more by expanding the capabilities of Freeway. I of course need to rely on SoftPress to do that, but to get them to do that means dialog like we’re having here.

Everyone who has come to understand the status quo of “responsive design” in Freeway has, in my observation, tried vehemently to defend that status quo. No one is peering outside the box that I can see. But I am. And that is why I mentioned Rapid Weaver and Stacks (which was actually brought up by someone else in this thread, but it was a good example so I continued with it). Rapid Weaver + Stacks is “another approach” that I think should stimulate thought on the part of SoftPress engineers on how to carry Freeway forward in terms of Responsive Design. No, not to clone RW + Stacks. But to consider well how they do it, in their modern UI, and then consider how Freeway can be improved.

"I still am not a hundred percent sure what you mean by 
'it should be easier', James."

Ditto what I just said about Rapid Weaver + Stacks. And no, I don’t want a clone of that. In fact, I am thinking about putting together a video of my trial version of RW + Stacks so I can show everyone where that silly software falls flat. But just because I don’t prefer that software over Freeway doesn’t mean we can’t learn a thing or two from their Responsive design approach. And I am talking about intuitiveness and usability here.

When I can sit down with an app and begin creating with it without having to have first read a manual or watch training videos, I know I’ve found a software gem. That’s what happened with MacWrite and MacPaint and all those early apps on the revolutionary Macintosh 128k that Steve Jobs brought to market. Those apps are revolutionary because they can be used by virtually anyone without deep knowledge of computing or “the status quo of things.” And although web design is much more complex than painting a pig in MacPaint, the fact remains that Freeway 2.0 back in 1999 was “the MacPaint of the web” to me back then. And it still is when I approach table-based designs. I don’t need to read manuals or ask endless questions on Freeway talk to accomplish a page editing task that I only have 15 minutes of time to implement. If I go Responsive, in the condition Freeway is in now, I take a big risk of not being able to do what I need to do within tight time constraints.

Earlier in this thread, someone said my sites look “dated.” Interestingly, no mention of the Freeway UI was included in that same sentence. If my sites are dated, what of the Freeway UI? Let’s be honest. It too is dated, and so are some of the design methods when it comes to Responsive Design. If some of you disagree, then please use the trial version of Rapid Weaver + Stacks, or other design apps. Sometimes using something else, even for a half an hour, can give a fresh perspective.

Many of you who vehemently defend the status quo of design in Freeway have said at times in the past that “Freeway was built upon a DTP model that no longer really applies to today’s web.” If you yourselves have said such, then you would agree, at least in part, with all I have been saying in this thread.

I am not condemning Freeway. I love Freeway. I love the community and the folks at SoftPress. And it is because of my 17 year long love that I am rather passionate about seeing the product have eternal life. I want Freeway to thrive. But Responsive Layout in Freeway today requires an education program. Don’t take my word for it. Look around here on FreewayTalk! Even people who have become good at Responsive Design in Freeway admit to the Learning Curve. I want to see that Learning Curve attenuated or eliminated.

Now, Thomas, I did read all of your post. And yes, I comprehended it too. Thank you for taking time to write those words. Thank you truly. And I see you did mention Rapid Weaver + Stacks and their grid, and you mentioned the “static DTP model” too. But you are still overlooking what I personally seek, perhaps because you have learned how to manipulate Freeway to do what you personally want, and you are, by and large, satisfied with that. And when someone is truly satisfied, what compels them to look for greater satisfaction? But I myself am not satisfied. I think things could be made a little better for all of us.

Paul Dunning has long spoken about the old “Relative Page Layout” action. Both he and I are fans of that Action because you can design your page as you always have when using tables, and then apply that action, and boom, you get a fairly Responsive end result. In other words, you can allow your brain to design without so many rules and constraints, and that magic Freeway Action will put your “droppings on the page” in the proper web form you wanted all along. It works almost like magic. Yet it isn’t magic. It’s real software.

SoftPress stopped supporting that Action for their own reasons. But the fact remains that such a level of sheer EASE is what most people seek. I am not asking for a set of templates either. I want to quickly dump what’s in my brain onto a page in Page View, then I want Freeway to crunch that into a nice modern form fit for the web. My explanation is overly simplistic, perhaps. But I think you follow what I am saying. No learning curve. Just fast and easy design, yet with flexibility not inherent to stupid templates.

Look, Thomas, you are an expert on Responsive Design in Freeway 7 Pro. No question. You rank among the best Responsive Designers here. And what has made you an expert is your knowledge of how to manipulate Freeway’s existing design tools. What I beg of you is to think beyond that box. Think beyond the status quo in Freeway today. Imagine if you could ask for nearly any new tool in Freeway and get it, what would it be? What new tools or techniques would help newbies immediately identify what needs to be done to get a certain shape or form or text or button on the page, exactly how they imagine it in their minds, but with minimal time and effort?

Think again about how Ernie kindly redesigned by table-based example into a Responsive object, and consider how many more clicks and Extended hacks and deep knowledge of Freeway were required to make that happen. With a table based approach, even a newbie can implement that little box quickly. But the Responsive approach takes much more study and many more clicks to produce a box that looks (on the surface) exactly the same as my table-based box.

If we’re honest, we all browse the web and spot something that looks really fabulous and ask ourselves, “I wonder how I could implement that or something similar in Freeway.” The day I can launch Freeway and do that in minutes, without having to consult a manual or ask questions for days on FreewayTalk, is the day we’ve made really progress. I can’t help it if I want Freeway to do more of the work. By asking more of Freeway, my brain is freed to think more deeply on the needs of my site and the way I want things to look.

Go back to Rapid Weaver + Stacks again. I am not trying to advertise that flawed approach to web design. I just mention it as an example because I recently downloaded the newest trial versions and gave them a go. Freeway allows me to Retina optimize my website, which I have done. But Freeway does not make that job easy to do correctly. Rapid Weaver + Stacks allows you to download a stack that makes the job easy. It will not only Retina optimize your graphics, but it will also detect when the 72ppi versions should be used instead of the 144ppi versions. I have my site 144ppi Retina Optimized, but I don’t have any checking. I sent 144ppi pics to everyone, simply because to do it the right way is too time consuming and hard in Freeway. I want to just tell Freeway, “Retina optimize my graphics and send low-rez or high-rez to the client intelligently.” That should be drop dead simple to do in Freeway (I’m talking, TWO CLICKS) but it isn’t. Freeway can be frustratingly difficult at times, and that’s a big reason we all come here to find answers and workarounds.

Freeway needs to be a design tool that frees my way. It needs to get out of my way and let my creative juices flow. Those juices don’t flow so well when they are told they must fit within the confines of a large number of draconian rules. Think about the RPL action and how it works its magic. You may be able to design something better than it does, but the fact remains that it brings remarkable simplicity to the end user. It is that simplicity that I seek, yet with design flexibility and power. I don’t want a template-driven Freeway. Yet I want something that is almost as easy.

Impossible?

We should never say “never” when it comes to making improvements in the design tools we use. That’s the theme of every single post I’ve made in this thread.

Thanks,

James Wages

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I’m a tech amateur and a senior (almost 73) whose ability to conquer a learning curve is gradually declining. That said, since 2004 Freeway has enabled me to put together a decent website (in the footer) without anything remotely approximating professional skills.

When the “responsive” emphasis came along, I shied away out of fear of a massive learning curve. But some posters on this website encouraged me that I could do it, so I jumped into Freeway 7 and converted my existing ~350-page website into being fully mobile friendly. One page at a time. Did it take a lot of work? Yes. Do I understand all the stuff that’s “under the hood”? No. But with a lot of helpful advice from this forum’s members, I got it done and every page passes Google’s and Bing’s mobile test tools.

Thank you, Freeway and this forum’s helpful members, for enabling a rank amateur to put something that matters a lot to me on the internet. If I can do it, almost anyone can!

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On 25 May 2016, 4:50 am, Jim Feeney wrote:

I’m a tech amateur and a senior (almost 73) whose ability to conquer a learning curve is gradually declining. That said, since 2004 Freeway has enabled me to put together a decent website (in the footer) without anything remotely approximating professional skills.

When the “responsive” emphasis came along, I shied away out of fear of a massive learning curve. But some posters on this website encouraged me that I could do it, so I jumped into Freeway 7 and converted my existing ~350-page website into being fully mobile friendly. One page at a time. Did it take a lot of work? Yes. Do I understand all the stuff that’s “under the hood”? No. But with a lot of helpful advice from this forum’s members, I got it done and every page passes Google’s and Bing’s mobile test tools.

Thank you, Freeway and this forum’s helpful members, for enabling a rank amateur to put something that matters a lot to me on the internet. If I can do it, almost anyone can!

I’ve just caught up on this post and would like to whole heartedly second what Jim said, and to also add a huge thank you to Thomas, The Big Erns, Walter, Tim, Richard, Caleb, Joe (sorry if I’ve missed anyone), who have helped me and others to better understand Freeway and it’s potential, and also to begin to understand HTML, CSS, Javascript etc, etc. Without their wise words, code and selfless help I wouldn’t be building the sites I am now.

Long may you continue to nurture our curiosity, tinkering and thirst for knowledge so that in turn we will hopefully also be able to help and advise our fellow Freewayers.

To The Big Erns - have a well earned break and hopefully see you again soon.

Thanks
Dave

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I tried replying to this post yesterday, but it somehow got eaten by the system after I clicked the Send button.

The gist of the message was this: I spent some kore time with a local business helping this with responsive sites using Freeway (read: the UX is such a mess that they need someone to get their design working).

These people are no slouches - they are the target audience for Freeway - they work mainly in print, they use Quark Xpress, and they also take on website work. Their clients want responsive sites, so the accommodate those wishes. The problem is that working towards creating a responsive site, for them (and I suspect many, many others) is horrible when compared with the rest of Freeway’s methodology.

Some background. Freeway has always made building sites easy. Back in the mid/late 1990s, we were making websites by eye - typing code, possibly with something like Adobe’s Page Mill, but mostly trying to get a layout to work in various browsers that would not agree on how HTML worked. Graph paper was employed, and, yes, tables were used. Freeway appeared and took all that effort away. Boxes were drawn in a window, and a nice, cross browser friendly site was produced. We worked like that for years.

Using tables for layout became less and less favourable, and we ran into a problem: it was just not seen to be doing it any more. After all, tables were for tabulated data, not for layout. We should be using relative positioning. It was a problem. We could use inline elements in Freeway for this, but it’s horrible to sue, not intuitive to people who are used to sketching and dragging boxes around a page. Guess what? Softpress made it easy. They created the Relative Positioning Action, which did the layout work using relative positioning instead of using tables.

It worked well, and still does. And for folk like myself who pour database content into Freeway generated layout, our work could continue with little modification. The layout reacted nicely to content of indeterminate size (when working with database content, you never know how much text there will be - your layout has to respond to that too).

So where are we now?> Well, responsive is the buzz word, and, again, Softpress attacked the problem. How did they do? Not too well. If you are happy doing non complex sites with a little responsiveness, then you’ll probably be fine. But if you want a layout that does the job properly, then you are stuck.

If you follow the video tutorial on the Softpress site, you’ll probably think that that’s it. The problem is that it isn’t. You’re using layered objects with absolute positioning. If you get things wrong, you’ll start to find items overlapping as to reduce the window width. You’ll need a number of breakpoints to ensure that this doesn’t happen. That’s a lot of work - breakpoints*page count = the true size of your site, and the work needed to maintain it. Received wisdom is to have as few breakpoints as possible. Possibly one, maybe two.

Also, if, like me, you are working on sites that get their content from databases, you need not just a site that responds to the width of the viewport, but ALSO to the vertical space that the content will occupy. You can“t use absolute positioning for this. It will fail in a spectacular fashion.

So, what are we to do? Well, abandon any freedoms you are used to in dragging content around the page. You HAVE to use Freeway’s inline model. And this is where it all falls down. I say this because inline working is a mess. You can’t see the cursor when it’s butted up against inline items like images for HTML boxes. You can’t drag stuff around easily either - again, the target location is very hard to determine. You have no “preview” to see how things flow as you drag. And that single undo is a pain.

Now, people are working around this. It’s great that some people are, but the argument of “knowing the material” doesn’t hold water. There are many obstacles to overcome - but in this instance, Freeway isn’t even attempting to help get the user up and running. It’s just dropped a load of partly complete tools on the workshop floor with the hope that you’ll do something with them. Remember: Freeway has in the past always held hands for those who have not the time to get up to speed.

So, we’re working inline. We’re finding out that in order to make a responsive image, you don“t import the image into an image box, but as a background to an HTML image, or as a passthrough. There’s a few restrictions right there - and remember that Freeway can produce retina images from a regular graphic box. So I’m not sure why that limitation is there. This trips the guy I help out every time. It’s an image. Use the image tool. Makes sense, right?

We can’t shift the order of elements around between breakpoints. Let’s say that a client wants elements in the browser to display like this:
2,1,3

Item 1 is important - it’s front and centre on the page. It’s not unreasonable to expect that on a phone, it’s the first thing you see, so the order would be
1
2
3

BUT if you are working inline (and remember that working inline gives you the most robust responsive experience that Freeway can produce), you can not change the flow of items. You are stuck with:
2
1
3
and the fun of explaining to a client why this is.

Now all this makes sense - I understand this stuff. BUT, and this is important, I feel that Softpress has applied artificial barriers to this way of working for reasons that are not consistent with Freeway‘s history of making designing for the web easy.

And I say this because there are apps out there that approach this problem and handle it far, far better. I am keeping my eye on Sparkle - that handles breakpoints, much like Freeway, BUT it can re-order elements. My 2,1,3 problem? It can reorder elements for the phone, so the order is 1,2,3. There are others out there too which are working in a similar fashion, and they are making Freeway look like it’s being left behind.

Really, Freeway needs to be doing this far, far better. I should be able to create responsive, dynamic content friendly without the restrictions/headaches/limitations of working. We know it’s possible. We know it can be done. There are 1.0 and 2.0 applications out there that are approaching the point where I can look at them and build the sites I want to make in the way I want without cracking Freeway open.

Freeway needs to change radically to address this problem. It needs to restore confidence in the user by making the UX consistent. It needs to remove artificial layout restrictions that are imposed by working in inline mode. For those with Stockholm Syndrome: it needs to improve the UX of inline working considerably.

AND there appears to be another Dunning in this thread! No relation (as far as I’m aware) but who knows?

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Well said.
Thank you Paul.

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One good WYSIWYG improvement would be if there was some way that would allow the Freeway document to reflect any extended attributes set without the need for previewing either in the app itself of in a browser.

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Yes, I agree. Although I also know that will take a foundational change to the application to pull off.

The Freeway design interface is not a browser, and it does not interpret the HTML + CSS that the page will be made of for one very strong reason: that page does not exist until you publish. Until that moment (and whenever the document itself is saved) each page exists as a set of preferences and properties in a higher-order format. Freeway is internally capable of DTP-level precision, while the Web has to stick to 72 points per inch by design. Freeway images can be any resolution or format, while the Web has to be a very few of each.

So when you say that Freeway should interpret the extended attributes at design time, you’d have to imagine that Freeway was “pressing” Publish every time you moved anything or adjusted any setting, scraping the resulting HTML, and somehow displaying it to you in an unresponsive overlay to the actual design view. The stutter as you moved something across the page would be pretty awful.

Unless the good folks in Oxford simply put the existing code out to pasture, and wrote something else that worked in a completely different manner, I don’t see this coming to Freeway as we know it.

Walter

On May 28, 2016, at 6:42 AM, Gordon Low email@hidden wrote:

One good WYSIWYG improvement would be if there was some way that would allow the Freeway document to reflect any extended attributes set without the need for previewing either in the app itself of in a browser.

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Unfortunately, Freeway’s dated UI (not merely the lack of WYSIWYG) may alone put the product out to pasture. How many apps these days still aren’t Retinafied? And then consider that even with a Retina look, the existing UI is not modern.

Again, ponder the jibe someone in this thread launched against my own Freeway made websites. My websites are Retinafied but they aren’t responsive nor do they have the same look as recent sites, hence the person said my sites were “dated.” Freeway’s interface and lack of WYSIWYG is dated.

If someone can effectively argue that my aging websites will actually scare off would be visitors in time, what then of Freeway?

Regardless of how much work is involved to make Freeway better, that time and effort must be invested to see the product alive and well 5 years hence. I believe that strongly, despite the fact that Freeway has been around with basically the same look and feel since the late 1990’s.

“We’ve dragged our feet on this for many years and Freeway’s still around” shouldn’t be our consolation. RapidWeaver with Stacks still isn’t a Freeway replacement in my opinion, but what web design tools will be around five years from now? If Freeway doesn’t get on the ball and take hints from all that has been said in this thread, it will eventually be dropped by users for something else. This isn’t my wish. I want to see Freeway have eternal life. And because I love Freeway so much, I am passionate about constructive criticism with the aim of positive change that will benefit everyone, even the amazing folks like Ernie, Thomas, Richard, Walter, and others who have adapted to the status quo in Freeway and defended it.

I want to free my mind from what we have now and look to a brighter future. That’s the freeway on which we all wish to travel.

James Wages

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Google is what it is and with their shift towards responsive a year and a half ago, sites need to be responsive in order to rank.

I certainly can’t speak for Softpress, but I have found their reps to be solid citizens. I have no doubt that responsive is a huge focus for their developers. They do monitor the forums and they take user posts seriously (and when the word “dated” comes up, they certainly take note, whether it be opinion or fact). I’m looking forward to the improved state of responsive in FW this time next year.

Back when I was a proper reviewer I know that I would never use the word “dated” unless there were a serious problem, because that word tends to reverberate with potential customers. Is FW dated in my opinion? I would stick with “quirky” for now, but the D word would be floating in the back of my mind. I will confess that I was scheduled to write a review of FW when the responsive features came out but the responsive features struck me as being not quite ready so instead of reviewing that release, I decided to throw it back and let it grow a bit first.

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On 31 May 2016, 8:44 pm, Trey Yancy wrote:

I certainly can’t speak for Softpress, but I have found their reps to be solid citizens…

Me too! Way back in the transition from Fwy 3.5 to Fwy 4 I had major issues with my website in making the change. I fault my amateur status for most of the problems. The Freeway support people spent many hours of back-and-forths with me and successfully walked me through the upgrade. Great support!

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Walter, since this thread is about “Responsive” design, and since one person mentioned my sites “look dated,” I am curious as to the layout concept behind FreewayTalk and ActionsForge.

Today, I viewed ActionsForge in Safari and on various iPhones using the Simulator. Here is a screenshot showing the Safari window horizontally shortened to minimum, and to the right you can see the iPhone 5S display:

http://cl.ly/0q1s3X1s1532/Image%202016-06-02%20at%209.52.04%20AM.png

As you can see, the Safari window content is a mess, with text overlapping text. And yet it compresses horizontally a bit better than the iPhone view, which doesn’t collapse the content in any “responsive” way at all that I can perceive. Safari gives the user a search bar, but on the iPhone its missing entirely.

And then there is FreewayTalk which doesn’t horizontally collapse at all in Safari or in the Simulator (i.e., not responsive). No screen shot of that, but just shrink your Safari browser window horizontally to see what I mean (nothing collapses in a “responsive” way).

Takeaways…

  1. My sites are no more “dated” than FreewayTalk or ActionsForge.
  2. If Responsive design in Freeway is supposed to be “easy” and a true “Forget about the code. Focus on design.” experience as the SoftPress site says, then one would logically expect ActionsForge and FreewayTalk to be fully Responsive too.

Yes, I am aware that Softpress.com is now a fully responsive site. And yes, I am aware that it takes time and monetary resources to convert FreewayTalk and ActionsForge into the same kind of truly responsive site that soft press.com is. But all I am saying is that if Freeway makes the Responsive magic happen “with ease,” then one would logically expect FreewayTalk and ActionsForge to be fully responsive by now (June 2016). I do not present this as a complaint against anyone. It is merely observation of fact. Furthermore, one could effectively argue that the visual appearance and functionality of FreewayTalk and ActionsForge preach volumes about Freeway, especially since Freeway users visit those sites far more than Softpress.com.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not trying to step on anyone’s toes, hurt feelings, or sound ungrateful for all the glorious things my beloved Freeway has done for me and all of you through the years. I still think Freeway is the greatest thing since sliced bread. And the support team and Softpress engineers are the cream of the crop. But it is clear to me that further work needs to be done to make Freeway faster and easier “for anyone” to design a responsive website without being forced to take college classes or read volumes on the subject. (I would encourage everyone to please re-read Paul Dunning’s recent post to this thread.)

Freeway should be as intuitive and natural and easy as it was (and still is) to table-based layouts, yet for Responsive layouts too. If Freeway Pro 7 was easier to kick out Responsive sites, I have little doubt that FreewayTalk and ActionsForge would both be fully responsive sites now. Again, I am not condemning people or the tool. This is constructive criticism with the aim of seeing Freeway blossom into what we all want it to be. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Best wishes,

James Wages

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Yeah, the ActionsForge home page gets to be quite a mess on small screens, I hadn’t really gotten fully on-board with responsive design when I came up with that one. Inside pages are much better, but it could be updated to a more responsive layout all around. When I get a spare hour or two. :wink:

FreewayTalk was designed in 2005 or 6 or so, long before responsive was a thing, and it was given a light facelift by Softpress when they took it over a few years ago, but it was hand-coded by me in the bad old days, and does not represent the state of any particular art – didn’t when I made it either. The impressive parts of that system are under the hood.

Walter

On Jun 1, 2016, at 9:11 PM, JDW email@hidden wrote:

Walter, since this thread is about “Responsive” design, and since one person mentioned my sites “look dated,” I am curious as to the layout concept behind FreewayTalk and ActionsForge.

Today, I viewed ActionsForge in Safari and on various iPhones using the Simulator. Here is a screenshot showing the Safari window horizontally shortened to minimum, and to the right you can see the iPhone 5S display:

http://cl.ly/0q1s3X1s1532/Image%202016-06-02%20at%209.52.04%20AM.png

As you can see, the Safari window content is a mess, with text overlapping text. And yet it compresses horizontally a bit better than the iPhone view, which doesn’t collapse the content in any “responsive” way at all that I can perceive. Safari gives the user a search bar, but on the iPhone its missing entirely.

And then there is FreewayTalk which doesn’t horizontally collapse at all in Safari or in the Simulator (i.e., not responsive). No screen shot of that, but just shrink your Safari browser window horizontally to see what I mean (nothing collapses in a “responsive” way).

Takeaways…

  1. My sites are no more “dated” than FreewayTalk or ActionsForge.
  2. If Responsive design in Freeway is supposed to be “easy” and a true “Forget about the code. Focus on design.” experience as the SoftPress site says, then one would logically expect ActionsForge and FreewayTalk to be fully Responsive too.

Yes, I am aware that Softpress.com is now a fully responsive site. And yes, I am aware that it takes time and monetary resources to convert FreewayTalk and ActionsForge into the same kind of truly responsive site that soft press.com is. But all I am saying is that if Freeway makes the Responsive magic happen “with ease,” then one would logically expect FreewayTalk and ActionsForge to be fully responsive by now (June 2016). I do not present this as a complaint against anyone. It is merely observation of fact. Furthermore, one could effectively argue that the visual appearance and functionality of FreewayTalk and ActionsForge preach volumes about Freeway, especially since Freeway users visit those sites far more than Softpress.com.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not trying to step on anyone’s toes, hurt feelings, or sound ungrateful for all the glorious things my beloved Freeway has done for me and all of you through the years. I still think Freeway is the greatest thing since sliced bread. And the support team and Softpress engineers are the cream of the crop. But it is clear to me that further work needs to be done to make Freeway faster and easier “for anyone” to design a responsive website without being forced to take college classes or read volumes on the subject. (I would encourage everyone to please re-read Paul Dunning’s recent post to this thread.)

Freeway should be as intuitive and natural and easy as it was (and still is) to table-based layouts, yet for Responsive layouts too. If Freeway Pro 7 was easier to kick out Responsive sites, I have little doubt that FreewayTalk and ActionsForge would both be fully responsive sites now. Again, I am not condemning people or the tool. This is constructive criticism with the aim of seeing Freeway blossom into what we all want it to be. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Best wishes,

James Wages

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Re Safari’s responsive design mode - I’m not convinced that it is entirely reliable. We have a php quote request form that is a mess in the RDM viewer but it works just fine on the mobile devices we’ve tested.

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For the record, I’ve never questioned the “reliability” of Freeway’s approach to Responsive design. Indeed, if you have the sheer design genius of Thomas, Ernie, Richard, David, Caleb and others who have chimed in on this thread, such is evidence that Freeway technically CAN be used to create responsive sites. But again, I refer everyone back to what PAUL Dunning said, which supplements everything I’ve said on the subject; namely, IT SHOULD BE EASIER.

Sure, when you know how to make Freeway kick out a fully responsive site with countless breakpoints, the end result seems to be “reliable” enough. But getting there is far easier said than done. And to be honest, that’s why Ernie and others get paid to create these amazing responsive sites. They get paid for their know-how. I simply would like the power to accomplish the same without having to learn a rather non-intuitive approach to responsive design. And I think all the folks who think I’m nuts and have cast stones at me to date do that because they simply do not know another way. It’s hard to think outside the box, but I it has to be done. Where there’s a will, there’s a way!

James Wages

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“Re Safari’s responsive design mode - I’m not convinced that it is entirely reliable.”

This is the option in Safari in the developers’ menu that provides a range of iOS device previews.

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I’m not trying to step back into this conversation, I really am not following it nor do I want to even put my head back into this space just yet. But I did leave without making a point that, like it or not, I think explains the practical issues with making “responsive” easier with something like Freeway.

First, I must point out that the little challenge James put out there, between the both of us we had devised no less than 3 ways to accomplish the task… and that was without giving it a good long think. So? Well, the thing about CSS and page code in general, is there is always more than one way to build or solve a design… sometimes there are more than I can count. So, when we layout something in Freeway, how does it decide which solution to implement? Which strategy or tactic to use? What inflow layout people are saying is that this is something for Humans to decide, something that users should decide.

Any “canned” solution would have to be a one-size-fits-all solution from the developers (AAAGGHHH!) which is what you get with other products which tradeoff that simplicity by limiting your ability to create custom design.

Responsive is more complex than even the surface that Freeway is scratching and I’m just saying that it is wishful thinking that it can be tackled without giving up something, either control of our design or our ignorance of how the sausage is made.

Should Freeway be easier? Yes, absolutely. But let me suggest that it should be easier to use as a learning tool, a training wheel and not a crutch.

I think that’s about all.

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Ernie, I sincerely appreciate your thoughts. Honestly, I value your opinion far more highly than you may think. Sometimes my replies come off as uncaring or ungrateful, and perhaps you may have felt that way after reading some of those replies in the past; but please know that I have the highest respect for your opinion and your design expertise. If anyone needs a well-crafted “Responsive” site and cannot create it themselves, you should be their go-to man.

You make a good point about “numerous ways of accomplishing the same thing.” And that’s why I think the existing “hard way” (which is “the only way” currently) of Responsive design in Freeway should continue to exist along side whatever “canned” approaches SoftPress can ingeniously contrive to make the lives of feeble-minded folk like me a tad bit easier. That’s all I’ve been trying to see throughout this entire thread. And please consider that Paul Dunning, a Freeway expert and Actions expert, also concurs with this thinking, so I am not alone here.

I have a great love for Freeway and its developers and the community behind it. I want Freeway to thrive for many years to come. If I didn’t, I would show nothing but apathy toward this forum. I can say provocative things at times, I realize that. But passion for a great product does make me a little insane. I just want Freeway to be insanely great.

Sincerely,

James Wages

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