Scrutinizing SPARKLE (Freeway alternative)

@Duncan: Using Sparkle, if I save my images as 288 ppi will that be a safe bet or ? The images need to look good.

Well I guess yes. Ultimately an image that as a pixel measurement is twice as wide or tall as the space it need to fit will be ok. 288 dpi, assuming your convention of 72 dpi, would be 4x, so more than enough. Anyway as mentioned Sparkle has a resolution indicator that helps understand this.

Duncan


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If the page size was 960px wide, the image would need to be 1920px wide for 2x?

That’s correct.

Duncan


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On 29 Aug 2016, 2:00 pm, waltd wrote:

All true, except two things – it’s pixels per inch (dots are for ink), and the browser really does not care about the ppi metadata.

What’s amazing here, is that only you and I who seem to understand this Walter! Even Thomas doesn’t. :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

From my point of view, I’m always amazed that seasoned photographers (chums) who have been doing their own websites for years, don’t understand and not only that, like James they keep insisting that the way they work it, is correct. (Of course, it doesn’t really matter most of the time if you don’t understand, if your ‘way of understanding’ produces the same result).

Anyway … just to reiterate (because repetition works :slight_smile: ) computer monitors and operating systems don’t care about ppi or dpi. All they care about is pixels.


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@grantsymon It’s pretty clear to me and not complicated to grasp, but sometimes you have to explain things in terms that people can understand when they have been given inaccurate or conflicting information for 20 years. Most people never had to think about this before retina came along.

Ashley

PS Your website seems to be down and gives a 503 error.


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On 29 Aug 2016, 7:12 pm, Ashley wrote:

@grantsymon It’s pretty clear to me and not complicated to grasp, but sometimes you have to explain things in terms that people can understand when they have been given inaccurate or conflicting information for 20 years.

That’s very true Ashley

Most people never had to think about this before retina came along.

Well they should have, but didn’t notice the confusion so much, because the ppi/dpi thing was the same pre-retina.

PS Your website seems to be down and gives a 503 error.

Thanks for the heads-up. It’s working for me, but it did load slowly. I guess the host may be doing maintenance.


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It’s working for me, but it did load slowly.

Loaded fine for me but I wish I hadn’t visited!

Being on a diet and looking at great pictures of great food don’t mix.

D


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It’s working fine for me now. Must have just been a temporary glitch with the server.

Ashley


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On 29 Aug 2016, 7:28 pm, DeltaDave wrote:

Loaded fine for me but I wish I hadn’t visited!

Being on a diet and looking at great pictures of great food don’t mix.

Well, you’ve only got yourself to blame Dave, cause if you hadn’t given me all that help, the damned site wouldn’t have been working at all!! :slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile:


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Well… Quite a lot of replies since yesterday. After reading them all, I remain satisfied with my own personal “frame of reference” as I describe in my screencast:


Thank you, Duncan, for point out the details on what Sparkle can do with regard to handling hi-rez graphics for us.


Walter, I viewed your little girl photos, but unfortunately, the lens did not focus sharply on her, so all of the graphics look blurred. If you start off with a razor sharp image to begin with, then retina depth will be more readily perceptible.


Thanks to all participants for this excellent discussion on graphic resolution!

James W.


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This example had nothing to do with retina, but rather the fact that no matter what “resolution” you set in Photoshop, 1,000 pixels is 1,000 pixels is 1,000 pixels. If the browser cared about PPI, then you would have seen the top image look large and blurry, the second one look half its size and sharp, and the third one look a quarter the size and really freakishly sharp. But despite the fact that the three images were set to different PPI, they were all the same size in a browser.

That’s all I was trying to explain.

Walter

On Aug 29, 2016, at 8:12 PM, JDW email@hidden wrote:

Walter, I viewed your little girl photos, but unfortunately, the lens did not focus sharply on her, so all of the graphics look blurred. If you start off with a razor sharp image to begin with, then retina depth will be more readily perceptible.


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@ Duncan, sorry I’m a bit late to the table. I’m not a web designer as such have created websites for teaching and motivation purposes in my business.
I’ve been using FW since 3Express, used FW5.5Pro quite a lot and bought many actions from many of you wonderful folk on this forum. I did buy FW 7 but have never got around to using it. Looking for a tutorial on FW7 I discovered yesterday the sad demise.

Having gone through this thread (and many others) it looks like I’m going to have to jump in with either Sparkle or Blocs or both.

My challenge is this: I used and still do use Max’s WebYep for CMS which is perfect for me as my programming ‘skills’ are limited to copy and paste. I don’t have the time to learn the language.
The CMS’s that appear in Blocs appear to be very pricey and over complicated to me.

Is there any way I can incorporate WebYeb into Sparkle (or does anyone know how?).

Many thanks in anticipation

Mark


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Mark, Sparkle is currently focusing on high performance static sites, a very steep road we’re still climbing. CMSs introduce too many compromises, such as replacing responsive images with plain non-optimized jpegs, lacking layout awareness and generally undoing the kind of optimization Sparkle is doing.

Our goal is fully visual page editing within Sparkle. The sort of integration CMSs require, and the complexities and abstraction that come with it, don’t quite work in that context. Not to mention the abysmal editing UI on the server side that most of these CMSs sport.

Duncan
http://sparkle.cx http://sparkle.cx/


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Greetings all,

I am finally getting around to try Sparkle on a new site I need to create. I’ve looked through the documentation and I’ve skimmed through this thread, so forgive me if it’s blatantly there and I am blind:
Does anyone know how you specify the page size? In FW we could specify the page size (width/height).

Many thanks and happy Thursday eve,
joette


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Never mind! I found it. Default for desktop is 960. Looks like it can be changed to 1200, nothing in-between. However, this might be a limitation of the free version which is what I’m using in case I need more than 5 days to play with it.

Best,
joette

On 28 Oct 2016, 12:26 am, redfeather wrote:

Greetings all,

I am finally getting around to try Sparkle on a new site I need to create. I’ve looked through the documentation and I’ve skimmed through this thread, so forgive me if it’s blatantly there and I am blind:
Does anyone know how you specify the page size? In FW we could specify the page size (width/height).

Many thanks and happy Thursday eve,
joette


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@ Duncan,

thanks for the reply, I totally understand. However, I’ve managed to achieve what I wanted using the free version and using the embed code to place an iFrame link to the site that enables me to do my editing. It’s a very similar to your documentation site at Managing Pages | Sparkle Documentation.

Did you create this in Sparkle, and if so, how are you creating this page? It appears to me that the info in the right hand panel is all that changes and the titles on the left are static? Is it done via anchors or some other way. Remember I’m not a programmer.

Am loving the simplicity and speed of Sparkle, achieving in minutes what would have taken me hours in Freeway. There are obvious limitations in control e.g. I could create some great text effects in Freeway using glows and shadows etc, but I realise the text would have been a graphic, but still hypertext linkable. Any plans for this in the future with Sparkle?

Finally, do you have any plans for starting a Sparkle forum? I feel a bit cheeky using FWT, but realise others may benefit from my lack of knowledge/experience. I’m very confused by the purpose of adding sections in the page add panel for example, or is this just a feature of the paid version. Your documentation touches on them but I don’t know how I would use them?

@ redfeather,

You aren’t limited to just a 5 day trial with the free version of Sparkle, it is time unlimited.


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On 28 Oct 2016, 8:46 am, MarkG wrote:

@ Duncan,

Did you create this in Sparkle, and if so, how are you creating this page? It appears to me that the info in the right hand panel is all that changes and the titles on the left are static? Is it done via anchors or some other way. Remember I’m not a programmer.

@Duncan again,

it occurred to me to show you the effect I’m using WebYep to create within the Sparkle designed site: www.2BFree.co.uk. As you can see the site is just a mock up, but the iFrame links to another site which I no longer use, created with FW5.5. The beauty of Sparkle is it’s so easy to use. When I haven’t used FW for a year or two (as in this case) I have a huge learning curve to go through, not to mention finding all the data and actions for the site, especially after I’ve ‘cleaned’ and reinstalled my OS!


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Hi Joette,

I think Freeway users are used to do it this way, we’ve heard the request for setting an exact page width a few other times. This is reminiscent of when websites had a small “optimized for 1024x768” sticker on them. The web is now overwhelmingly mobile, there’s no going back.

In general what you want is not let the content determine the page width, rather to have make the content work with any page width.

In Sparkle we decided to adopt the fixed page width layout because it is immediately understandable for anyone with a design and print background, and it has a predictable behavior. This isn’t in contrast with the above because you can have multiple fixed width layouts and let the visiting browser automatically pick the layout that fits it best.

So why did we pick 1200/960/768/480/320? Because they are by far the most common browser widths, if you were to chart it out you’d see for example a big fall between 960 and 1000 pixels and another after 1200. This suggests that you should optimize your content for those widths, and not pick some width in between which would be sub-optimal for users on either side.

To partially refine what I wrote above, Sparkle isn’t precisely only fixed width, there are several element types that can extend to the page edges, so you can have a full width image or gallery or map, for example. Also we are working on adding this ability to more elements and blur the lines of fixed/fluid width.

There’s no difference in the purchased version, though as @markg mentions there’s no time limit on the free Sparkle version.

Duncan
http://sparkle.cx http://sparkle.cx/


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Hey Mark,

the documentation page is indeed built in Sparkle. The navigation on the left is simply a menu element with a vertical orientation, it auto-populates from the website pages and it’s made visible on all pages. The outcome is that it’s possible to add a new page, which will show up in the menu in all pages, and just add the text block on the right side.

Regarding text effects we definitely should add CSS shadows, hopefully we’ll get around to them soon.

We do have a plan to add a forum but it’s held up for a few reasons, agreed FWT isn’t the best venue for this.

In Sparkle a section is a collection of pages, the purpose of this is threefold:

  1. you visually organize the site outline
  2. when you have a menu that is populated from the website structure (as opposed to manually configured), the section becomes a submenu
  3. when you show elements in multiple pages, Sparkle’s version of master pages, you have the option to show them in the whole site or just in the current section, which is useful when a section has something visually distinctive that you can then edit from one of the section pages and have show up identically throughout the section.

Duncan
http://sparke.cx http://sparke.cx/


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HI Duncan,

thanks for the super quick response. I need to play around a bit more, but again I love the creativity aspect that you’ve created with Sparkle, so that all sites don’t need to look the same (or similar). I look forward to sharing some of my sites in the future, created by Sparkle.

I’ll be now buying Sparkle, but was a bit confused by the moment that if ordered on Apple app store it can be used in iCloud, but not if bought directly from your site? Are you intending to create an iPad version?

thanks again

Mark


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It is probably time to change that text, it says:

Apple has chosen to limit iCloud use to Mac App Store apps, so if you require iCloud you should purchase the Mac App Store version.

This was true in MacOS X 10.9, but was progressively relaxed and the only actual difference is that with the App Store version of Sparkle you get a Sparkle folder inside iCloud, with the version from our site you need to browse to iCloud Drive and save a document there directly.

While we are super careful to avoid doing things that would prevent an iPad version of Sparkle from happening, it needs to make sense from a business point of view. So who knows, perhaps.

By the way the discount offer from our site still stands:

Duncan
http://sparkle.cx http://sparkle.cx/


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