Xway b7 is here!

Xway
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Xway b7 is here!

We have just released Xway b7, the latest version of our next-generation program for visual web design.

You can download it from our website.

Documentation

User guide

Xway comes with a detailed reference manual, which you can access by choosing Xway User Guide from Xway’s Help menu. This also includes an appendix with a list of new features and cross-references to documentation in the user guide — this is a good place to start if you’re upgrading from a previous version of Xway. If you’re new to Xway, a good place to start is the introduction to the user guide, and the introductory tutorial (see below).

Tutorials

A good way to become familiar with Xway is to work through the introductory Xway Tutorial. Select Xway Resources from the Help menu to go to the Xway Resources section of our website, and click on Tutorials, near the bottom of the page, followed by Download the Xway tutorial on the Tutorials page. This takes you through the steps for creating a simple website.

The Xway Tutorial is the first in a series of tutorials. The next tutorials in this series are the Xway Menu Tutorial, which introduces navigation menus, and the Xway Flexbox Tutorial, which introduces Flexbox layout. All these tutorials, and the documents they create, are available from our website.

Sample documents

There are two collections of sample documents that you can download from our website: Ambient and Ambient Light. These were created using the Xway Tutorial, Xway Menu Tutorial, and Xway Flexbox Tutorial.

New features

The main addition to Xway b7 is Flexbox (CSS Flexible Box Layout). This allows you to create layouts in which boxes are horizontally or vertically distributed, and can wrap to fit different devices. The Xway Flexbox Tutorial provides an introduction to Flexbox, and shows how it can be used in the Ambient and Ambient Light sample documents. There is also a chapter on Flexbox in the Xway User Guide.

  • Flexbox (CSS Flexible Box Layout)
  • Code spans

Bug fixes and improvements, including:

  • Improved flexible-width calculations
  • Xway doesn’t overwrite HTML files unless the content has changed
  • Nested links are removed after pasting text and after pasting or dragging boxes with attached links
  • The CSS generic font Monospace is displayed using the system’s “user fixed-pitch font” (typically Menlo) rather than Courier. This matches the font used by Mac browsers and Webkit
  • Fixed a crash that occurred when changing a master page to None and back
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Oh wow; CSS Flexbox is incredibly powerful and useful. Weaving this into Xway is going to make a HUGE difference when creating rich, responsive layouts.

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Hallo,
thank you for the excellent work on Xway b7! I have created several webistes with Freeway Pro which are all still active and working well. Xway b7 brings me close to the point of transferring those websites. There are just a few questions left:

I have been using some Freeway Actions like Spawn New Window etc. Is there or will there be a way of using Freeway Actions in Xway 7b?

Will the next update include the FTP functionality?

Sincerely, Ernst

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Hi Ernst,

Xway doesn’t support Freeway Actions. Adding some kind of plug-in functionality is something we will look at in future. On the other hand, Xway has built-in support for many of the features that Freeway supported through Actions (iframes, youtube, vimeo, maps, CSS rollovers, menus, link to PDF etc.), and there’s a field in in the Page and Document Inspectors that allows you to add JavaScript if you need to do that. Xway also supports markup items (similar to Freeway) and other forms of page markup (as in Freeway).

We’re working on upload, so it’s possible it will be in the next version.

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I know that is going to be popular!

Walter

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