Xway 1.0 Bug Report: Freeway 7 Pro document import, 2 Graphics Issues

[JDW (James Wages)]

This is a bug report presenting two graphics related issues.

ISSUE#1
When opening any of my FW Pro 7 documents in Xway 1.0, I find that all the graphics are replaced with a box a question mark, indicating that Xway is making no attempt to search the drive and find them. And here’s the crux. For all the graphics, I am see Xway show me the exact “path” in the right sidebar. I click a graphic, it shows me the path, but it says inaccessible. And yet, when I click the “Locate…” button, it takes me right to the folder where the graphic is located, and then I manually click that graphic, click the “Locate” button, and boom! It’s linked and looks normal.

Because the path is showing as correct, I assume this to be a bug. And because most Freeway sites have a rather large number of graphics, it behoves us to consider how this bug should be fixed, because it really does impact, in a major way, how Freeway 7 Pro website documents are imported. Honestly, it’s far too much work to manually relink all the graphics, hence the need for a fix.

ISSUE#2
A second bug pertains to UI performance in regards to moving graphics. For example, if I open one of my Freeway 7 Pro files at random, as I just said, all the graphics are missing and replaced with placeholder boxes with “?” marks inside. If I click and drag any one of those boxes at random, it takes no less than 3 full seconds before that box will appear in the location I moved the mouse to, before I even release the mouse button. Also, if I keep the mouse button held down, after the graphic finally does move to the new location, if I subsequently, drag the mouse to a different location, it takes another 3 seconds for the placeholder box to appear at that new location.

I am using a late 2015 5K iMac top end model with internal 1TB SSD. Yes, it’s an old Intel Mac, but it is by no means slow. Of course, I don’t have these performance issues in any other app either, which provides further evidence that it is not the age or slowness of my processor that is the issue. I am using macOS Monterey.

Thanks.

UPDATE: After working more in Xway, I have come to realize this affects DIV boxes too. It’s not exclusive to graphics boxes. Even if I click and drag to expand the width of a DIV text box, it takes 3 seconds before anything changes on screen.

[Jeremy (Jeremy Hughes)]

Hi James,

Your first issue happens because Xway is sandboxed, while Freeway (unlike most modern Mac applications) isn’t. Xway knows the location of the graphics, but it doesn’t have permission to access them: that’s why they’re listed as Inaccessible in the Resources view. This is called out in the User Guide, which has an appendix on opening Freeway documents. The Summary section in the appendix includes the following steps:

1. Choose Open from the File menu (shortcut: ⌘O) and select a file that
   has a .freeway extension.
2. Switch to the Resources view and locate resources.

Note that when you locate an inaccessible resource, it’s better if you don’t select the actual resource. Xway navigates to the correct folder, and if you click on the Locate button without selecting a resource, Xway can locate any other resources that are in that folder because you’ve given it permission to access the folder (rather than a single resource within the folder).

[Jeremy (Jeremy Hughes)]

For your second issue: Xway is doing much more than Freeway did when laying out a page in its Page view — it has a flexible Page view that is recalculated whenever the content changes — so I’m afraid it will be slow in comparison with Freeway if you’re using a 9-year old machine. My current machine is a four-year-old M1 Mac Mini, and moving boxes is pretty instantaneous.

However, the fact that you’re moving boxes around suggests that you’re using Xway in a Freeway-like fashion: putting boxes on a page, changing them to absolute position (“layers” in Freeway), and moving them to where you want them. The problem with this approach is that it creates inflexible designs that won’t adapt to different devices (phones, tablets, etc.). We tried to move away from this in Freeway 6 and 7, by making it easier to use inflow layout (and also by adding what I now think was an over-complex system of breakpoints) and we used this approach in Freeway templates, most of which have now been converted to Xway templates.

Xway is designed to create flexible layouts. It defaults to inflow layout, but also provides support for absolute/fixed/sticky position boxes for (less common) situations where these are appropriate. What inflow layout doesn’t give you by itself is the ability to position boxes side-by-side. Freeway templates used float layouts (and assorted hacks) to do this, but the modern CSS way to do this is to use flexbox layout. With flex layouts, you can have boxes that appear side-by-side on wider devices, but wrap vertically on narrow devices. Apple do this on their website, and we do the same with the Softpress website.

There are Xway tutorials that provide step-by-step instructions for creating flexible websites. For anyone who is coming from Freeway, I think it’s a good idea to work through the first introductory tutorial. The second tutorial deals with navigation menus, and the third tutorial covers flexbox layout. [We also plan to create video versions of these tutorials.]