On 5 Feb 2019, 9:29 pm, Elizabeth wrote:
Hello Grant and other members,
I’ve been wondering is Freeway Pro still worth using nowadays? I can’t tell if they made any updates lately from the website? I used to use Freeway and then changed to Muse and now find any other apps are in blocks or glorified tables which I’m not keen on…
Freeway does today, exactly what it did before Softpress were forced to stop and rethink. The only thing that is different, is that going forward, from September 2019, it will no longer work with the current MacOS and probably any Mac produced thereafter. It will however, continue to work in exactly the same way with all previous Macs and OS’s. I realise this sounds obvious, but as someone who was constantly stunned to see that my photo software of choice from the 90s, was, to this day, never replaced by anything similar and incredibly, I continued to use it right up until last year. Why? Because it was faster than Photoshop (sometimes much faster) and still produced beautiful files, just as it did all those years ago. Ironically it saved me thousands in purchases and when my Mac eventually died, I replaced it with a second hand one, that costs a couple of hundred instead of 3 or 4 thousand. Hmmmm. The other irony, was that the because the OS never changed, there were no updates and the machine became a totally dedicated unit. Frozen in time. What welcome relief!!
Freeway is a powerful piece of software. That’s not going to change. The web however, is changing and perhaps unlike digital images, which remain the same today as they were back in the 80s when we drum scanned to produce high-res tiffs, FW might get left behind. Only time will tell. I’m hopeful that Softpress (Jeremy) will be able to shift what must be a complex morass of code, across to the modern MacOS, relatively quickly, as Walter says, by taking advantage of all those modern tools, like Swift and all the pre-built parts of Apple apps that are provided by those tools. You no longer have to reinvent the wheel every time you start a new project. I’m guessing that we’ll see a Pages like UI, which will be absolutely fine with me, because it is really well thought out, is easy to use and we’re already used to it. Hopefully we won’t need to do so much hopping about in the UI, as we do at present. Apple are putting tabs everywhere and they work well too (surprised just today to see how well they work in Mail, if you need to consult a few emails whilst writing another). Pages is perhaps also a metaphor for FW, because when it was rewritten to move to modern code, it lost a lot of functionality, much to the displeasure of the Pages using public. Very very slowly it has regained most of that. I hope that FW will not prove so reluctant to bring back any useful lost features, but I’m expecting them be proactive. For whatever reasons, Apple decided that pros and heavy users were not their base and turned their backs on us back then. Also, it has always seemed to be in their DNA to leave one or two irritatingly tiny little features missing from their software. Sigh.
Like everyone else, I looked at FW alternatives, after the Softpress announcement, but found nothing that really appealed. I’m not a pro, so I didn’t feel compelled to ‘move with the times’. Ironically … where I am a pro, I didn’t either … so that probably tells you something about me. I’m fairly pragmatic and I don’t think the sky is falling in. It turns out that 2 years on from the Softpress announcement, Freeway Pro is still working and I can do exactly the same things with it. I’m very hopeful, having looked at alternatives, that there is a market for a modern vs of Freeway. It seems to me that FW is just a good idea. I like the way it works. That said, communities are very important and this one has helped me enormously with my projects. (Special thanks to Delta Dave who helped me a great deal). So it’s important for Softpress, going forward to nurture the community as well as produce the software. Quite a task, but the rewards will hopefully be there.
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