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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