Upcoming News re Freeway

Freeway
64

I’m certainly happy, too for this audience having their beloved application back.

The last half year taught me a lot. It mainly taught me, that a good amount of people all across available platforms and applications simply do not know what responsive design is. Neither from the technical nor from the design approach.

It has even been declared as the “FUTURE” of web-design some lines above.

Yes, the RESPONSIVE element is the future and I guess where SP (and myself) were lagging.

Responsive has been described the first time back in 2010 (A list Apart by Ethan Marcotte), and with introduction of media queries in CSS3 in 2012 it’s available for to use. The future isn’t now (or in future), the future is 5 years old. Some could call it the past - or even standard.

I started web design at the age of 39 or 40 - nearby 10 years ago. I knew nothing!!! Even less. FreewayPro taught me, that you can walk in slow steps. But Freeway taught me as well, that those steps doesn’t necessarily need to be bigger or even faster to reach a goal. It simply taught me walking target-oriented.

The key knowledge of successful web-design is being aware, what “positioning” or placing an element (mostly a green rectangle) means - literally. Ask yourself: “What is the purpose of this element?” How shall it react if it is displayed in different conditions (smaller canvas, bigger canvas) and how shall it finally interact with other elements on the same canvas (the one below - or to the right).

Rather than searching for an “alternative” you could have had an invest in this. Or you even should. Because it is important for all applications out there.

I heartily fought pro FreewayPro and its concept of creating responsive design. But these days I think, that it isn’t flexible enough to attract people - say below 39 - giving it a go. And who will substitute all those current user once they retire?

That’s the future up to my definition - and fighting with 49 is painstaking, if not to say pointless.

Cheers

Thomas

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65

Tell you what… Thomas if you really want very very VERY old responsive design
have a look at this… its the earliest form of responsive design I know and it comes from an era of basic html.

Have a chuckle… but you can’t argue the fact that this old design is a real pioneering responsive site.

https://web.archive.org/web/20040325033617/http://www.fleetlanguagecircle.org.uk/

max

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66

Max -
If you were to bring that forward about three years, that would reflect the state of the consumer site for the place where I work when I signed on six years ago - a large manufacturer of high-end consumer products (occupying a 40 acre facility) that positions itself as being the very best in the entire product category. This outfit did not have Ethernet until 2003.

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67

Yep - Max I certainly agree.

To be honest, I even know an older one. It still exists and is:

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

I recently tried to explain, that we do not have to MAKE a page responsive, all we have to do is to KEEP it responsive.

But you know what? Nobody understood me.

Cheers

Thomas

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68

Age isn’t an issue to me, Whether I’m 20 years old or 60, it is irrelevant. Creativity has no age in my mind. You either want to move with the times or not. I keep up to date with most of my programs as it’s my business and I am totally compatible with my other colleagues. I do agree that RESPONSIVE scared the living crap out of me when I got FW 7 and I lazily opted out from learning, but now want to get stuck in. I saw a client yesterday and they showed me their new responsive site and they were more knowledgeable than me - DOH! Of course there are added restrictions etc, but whether I like it or not, I WILL learn it and utilise it with as much flexibility as I can within what I currently do on FW and continue to earn money by doing so. Just saying… (Dave Streeten)

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69

I have to say I began to lose all hope in you guys not returning. But and if all goes well your return would be much appreciated more than you think. There are many mac users that rely on your great product/s and have got used to using FWP etc… I don’t think I in particular have the time to use or redesign my (half finished) website with another product. keep the upgrades coming and I will pay for them. I understand that for what ever reason you going out and HOPE THAT THIS IS NOT GOING TO BE THE CASE - You guys are great!! Please come back and I know your product will someday be realised by many more.

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70

It’s not a matter of losing interest in Freeway or it’s community; it’s a matter of tools getting old and not sufficient anymore. Softpress’ Freeway just didn’t made the cut anymore. Years and years of adding feature requests to the beta list, none of the important ones still aren’t honoured.

I wrote this comment 9 years ago (March 2008), but I could have written it yesterday:

I’m sorry to start about this, but hey … an honest opinion from an enthousiast user.

It’s coming up, an upgrade from Freeway 4 to 5. But what is really coming up? No major anything. All bugfixes, and a handfull of savvy actions.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m very keen with the Scriptalicious actions. Ajax functionality in Freeway. This really could be the start of a whole new Freeway. What more can be added? I’m really excited about this one.

But Blogger templates? Hmmm … I don’t see the bigger picture here. Same goes for the graphic effects en background images. Nice but … no, just nice.

CSS Menu’s aren’t new to Freeway. It has been here allready, it just has been updated. That’s what it says on the website as well … updated this, updated that … but nothing groundbraking, nothing that makes Freeway 5 an upgrade rather than an update. There hardly is anything honestly new. Dozens of bugfixes should be just monthly updates or whatever.

I would rather see something that brings Freeway back where it was before: ahead of the competition. Let’s be honest; however it has been asked for numbers of times: you can’t get to the generated code unless you use Tim’s Source Code Snooper. Why? Why not put this into Freeway? If you don’t want to look under the hood, just don’t! But at least hand the opportunity.

Same goes for CSS and stylesheets. Why give just a couple of selectable options and hide the rest behind the Extended button? Why make people write the code in ‘Extended’ while you can perfectly should be able to do this in the Styles?

Take a look at Coda or CSS Edit … those app’s don’t just look amazingly ‘Leopard-like’, they work perfectly and give you everything you need to handle code, stylesheets, whatever. This is what Freeway lacks … that ‘something’ that just completes the whole picture, interface-wise as well as functionality. Freeway 5 is perfectly stable, works like it should, it’s more that fine. But -to me- nothing compared to Freeway 4 stands out so much that ‘you just have to get Freeway 5’.

I will buy Freeway 5 … ofcourse I will. It still is an amazing application, wich does everything it promises, even more. But after using Coda and CSS Edit I’m just affraid that we are getting behind. Freeway doesn’t deserve that, it was and should be number 1 (or at least top 3).

Still a proud user, Richard

Sad fact is that Freeway within years struggled with that MacApp legacy, but even though there was a 8-year gap between FW5 and FW6 … nothing happened. We kept trying to work with the tools we had, even though they weren’t that sufficient … but hey … even with FW5 you were able to create adaptive/responsive/fluid websites. And fact is that even though the hardcore FW users kept pushing requests and reports to Softpress, hoping something would happen. It just didn’t.

I can only hope Jeremy gets it.

– Richard

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71

I have little doubt that Mr. Hughes “gets it.” Freeway was merely held back my its MacApp roots. Rebuilding it in Swift will be no small undertaking, assume that is even what SoftPress2 is up to. But whatever is built in Swift by them should be far better than anything produced on MacApp when running on our modern Macs in this day and age. The only matter will be how long it will take to develop such an app. Even small changes to Freeway took ages in the past. But I don’t know if that was due to MacApp or something else. I guess we need to wait and see. But there must have been some light seen at the end of the tunnel for SoftPress2 to have been created. I doubt it was revived on a whim.

–James Wages

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72

You’re absolutely right, my friend.

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73

Allow me to post my two cents, Thanks first for returning to build Freeway for the users that enjoy it, I read lots of these emails (sorry not all) and I have learned from the many great users here, from what I see there is no way for Softpress to exist if their only target is the PRO designers making a living from this app, they need guys like me as well, I buy every update but only update my one web site once every year or two. So with that being said I do need/want features that are the Freeway best but can not afford to pay a subscription for my extremely limited use. I don’t think I am alone in this as I’m sure Softpress has more that 15-25 users. I fully understand what the Pros want and actually need to a lesser degree than me. I would like some of those features too but will never learn CSS or HTML. So I hope all you PRO users get what you want and need but that Softpress can still remain within reach for guys like me.

Thanks, Studiodave

ps: a quick search on my system shows I have 106,891 emails from Freewaytalk going back to 2008

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74

FW doesn’t force users to go beyond their comfort zone. It could still build flat static sites as before, if I wanted. For those who prefer to keep things easy, the only relevant changes in the UI have been in various sizing options (flexible, etc.).

For those who need to keep things simple, the best thing is to hang on to earlier versions. I manage one static site, for example, that was designed on 5.5 and is not in need of conversion to something newer. If there are any small tweaks needed, I launch 5.5. For all my other sites I use 7.

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75

Again I must say that I am much relieved to learn that my beloved Freeway Pro will be around now maybe much longer than me! (I was terminal two years ago at this time and ended up getting an experimental aortic heart valve popped in without open heart surgery)

Years ago, like in 1997 I knew that sooner or later I would not be able to continue doing my electrical contracting and the isolation of ceiling mounted surgical microscopes and started to study SEO in the summer of 97, a year before Google was on the net.

Being SEVERLY dyslexic I can not do any real coding and never intended to learn it really. I bought my first computer that same year because I saw it all coming together, the decades long visions in my head, multimedia and broadband. It was finally becoming possible and it was a very exciting time for me and though I had a very complex business dealing in the world of micro surgery, I did not have all that much intensions of using the computer for business as I did to learn multi media and the web.

Next month makes it twenty years I’ve been using a computer, always a Mac. My first three paid for applications were Photoshop 3, QuickTime 3 Pro and Netscape. (Yes, I paid $35 for Netscape!)

The amazing thing about the Mac and the applications made for it, especially back then was the fact that all you needed was the thoughts in your head and the determination to make it happen with multi media. You picture in your mind what you want and tell that to the software and then the software itself writes the code. PERFECT!

Started using PageMill around 2000, moved on to GoLive and a few years later got screwed on GoLive 9 and in January 2009 I started using FWP as my web software. The beauty of FWP is that you do not have to be a “pro” at anything to make a website basically as you want. Granted, I am not an artist and have little graphic training whatsoever, so my web design is not the best visually.

But here’s where I found FWP to really help me make most of my living these days. It really allows me to create my style of organic SEO that puts my clients at the top of the search results on the first page. To me the very most important aspect of any business website is the careful plotting and planning of building a solid foundation in SEO and then build the design around the needs of the SEO for that client.

My clients’ competition all mostly use WP or another CMS web builder and I find that truly puts me to the advantage right from the start. A complex “backend” can and does really screw with SEO and you’re best not to use it when you can.

The way that I can manipulate how I want the directories in a site, how I can name the URLs and many other little things that are just common sense to my SEO seem to be a tough thing to maneuver with the CMS systems. And the search engines are not reading a ton of crap before it finds the SEO parts it wants to read like it does in a CMS.

Granted, I need to learn more HTML and CSS now these days. But after a week of trying to use Pinegrow, I am so GLAD that I can still use FWP and keep doing what I have been doing!

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76

Another great thing about FWP is that there are so many great inspirational people using it.

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77

This was a very nice surprise. Glad I was putting off transferring my few sites to Rapidweaver or Blocs. Now it’s business as usual for me.

Thank for that!

Anyway, anybody happy that Softpress is back, head to their Marketplace and purchase something, just to show you’re glad they’re back!

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78

I’ve been a Freeway Pro user since 2004, when I wanted to build a batch of websites without learning coding, but rely upon my knowledge of Adobe products.

Freeway fit the bill. I probably didn’t have to spend more than a couple of hours looking up things in the manual before I had everything down. And I found that the updates occurred often enough for the software to be current (according to my limited expertise), but not a case of updateitus, where you’d have to worry about endless conflicts.

I don’t do much with the websites I administrate; just make changes when necessary. But I was so concerned about not being able to update my MAC OS on a regular basis that I installed the MAC 10.11.3 on a virtual machine with VM Fusion and transferred all of my freeway stuff to that virtual machine. For a reason I could not determine, Freeway worked fine, except that I could not add text or select existing text to modify. After 3 hours of trying to find a solution, I was getting ready to create another VM with a lower version of El Capitan, 10.11.

Before doing that I checked the Softpress website and discovered that they have been exhumed. Naturally I am grateful. Like everyone, I’d love to know when one could expect FW to be Sierra compliant.

Not that I am complaining, mind you. I’m an old guy who was a techie “back in the day,” having been retired 8 years, and not looking to haunt all of the boards to figure out the latest tweaks. I just want my stuff to work so I can go onto other things.

So best to Jeremy et al. I hope that the transition to Swift based code works out, and that we’ve many years to go with such an intuitive and friendly product.

greg

greg

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79

Just testing here to see if my comment posts, as my the one I posted earlier didn’t take.

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80

Haven’t checked-in in a while…nice to find this update! In the meantime, I’ve been tinkering with PineGrow Pro (bought it) and CoffeeCup (until the trial ran out).

Would like to take this Freeway new development opportunity to express my top “wish list” items. First, I’ll voice some of my likes and dislikes of Pinegrow and CC to put them in context:

I like Pinegrow for the following reasons: Can open up other sites from any program (no need to rebuild), brings in the style sheets, etc. (so far, perfectly!). The latest version includes a built-in CMS that is very easy to apply to any element that you would want clients to be able to edit themselves. (I should add that Muse now has a built-in CMS, albeit limited) that also enables the desktop file to automatically update to include any in-browser changes.) I also like that Pinegrove is a combination of visual and coding. I’m not an expert coder by any means, but I like that I can easily access it when I want or need to. On the flip-side, while Pinegrove has much flexibility, it also has a big learning curve (I’m still at it) and there are certain things about the interface I wish were different and more intuitive.

CoffeeCup: Fun, intuitive interface. Lots of add-on components and always developing more. They say they are working on the ability to edit visible code (side panel type-thing) and a built-in CMS feature, as people have been asking for these, but they don’t have a roll out date. A new version is coming out soon, but it doesn’t look like it will include these yet. They definitely will not be offering the ability to open up sites created in other programs.

So, for Freeway Pro, my top wish items for the new version are: 1. Easy, built-in CMS (to allow clients to edit specific areas…text, photos, videos, etc.—a must-have these days.) I’m aware there are 3rd party plug-ins available, but prefer to have all-in-one, and even better if the desktop file could pull-in any changes made by the client (like Muse does); 2; Ability to edit code in a side panel or pop-up, rather than buried in extended panes, etc.; 3. Fresh, new interface— as much as I like FW, I always felt the interface was a bit clunky and dated; 4. Ability to open up other html sites. I realize this last one may be the toughest from a programming aspect, but it would be great. It could also encourage non-users to transfer over (like InDesign did with Quark…subsequently replacing Quark as the professional design industry standard.)

If the new FW Pro could incorporate all or most of these, it could leap beyond its competition, as none of them contain all these features. I realize I’m looking for perfection, but it doesn’t hurt to ask. :slight_smile:

In the meantime, I won’t begin new sites using FW, as it will affect my professional credibility if a client ask what program I’m creating their website in or googles Freeway to find the company has gone out of business.

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81

Personally, I think this is a weird thing to think… I have been building and designing sites for 20 years with literally thousands of items such emailers, websites, print items, video work, and no client has ever asked what I have created the item in.

If I were you I wouldn’t worry

max

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82

Personally, I think this is a weird thing to think… I have been building and designing sites for 20 years with literally thousands of items such emailers, websites, print items, video work, and no client has ever asked what I have created the item in.

Agree - all my sites are built with html and css - the actual application is just not relevant!

D

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83

Just tell your client you use a variety of tools, not excluding hand-coding (which we all do to some extend even within Freeway). It’s not like a client needs to know every little secret you employ to get the job done. Maybe they are asking so they can go out and buy the tool you mention so they can then ditch you!

James W.

Proud user of Freeway, since 1999.

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