Review: Freeway 4 Pro

Product Name: Freeway 4 Pro
Company: Softpress Systems
URL: http://www.softpress.com
Category: Web design software
Price: $280
Requirements:PowerMac running OS X; Universal Binary for Intel & PPC
Rating: 4 Bounces - Pure Lust

Freeway Pro is a web design program that separates the user from the HTML code. Unlike programs such as Dreamweaver that essentially edit and render HTML code on the fly, Freeway Pro has its own documents that are only exported as HTML at the end of the design process. This difference is both the strength and the weakness of the program. On the one hand, Freeway allows the designer much more flexibility that would be possible if the program was creating and editing graphics and HTML code directly.


Freeway Pro allows the user to quickly produce web sites in a variety of formats but without the need to edit HTML.

The downside to the equation is that Freeway was, and remains, a poor choice for web designers needing to edit HTML code directly. Things that are straightforward in a text-based editor (such as BBEdit or Dreamweaver’s text view) can be difficult to do in Freeway. To take one example, if you wanted to replace the degree symbol (˚) for the HTML code version of that symbol, &deg, so as to ensure your web page looks right on all web browsers, you’d be out of luck. Freeway doesn’t work this way, so you’re stuck with having to find and change each instance, one at a time.

This disconnect between the Freeway document and the resulting HTML code can be frustrating for some users, but for others, myself included, the advantages to having an intuitive, graphical interface outweigh these minor niggles.

Installation & Performance

Installation was simple and presented no problems. Freeway Pro comes with a number of guidebooks as well as a built-in help file. A nice “Getting Started” manual in PDF points out the basics clearly, and anyone with a basic understanding of how to use a Macintosh will pick up the key elements of Freeway quickly. Though purists might decry these WYSIWIG web page editors, there’s no question that they are helpful for those who don’t known any HTML and have even less interest in learning about it.


Upon launch, the user is offered a small selection of quite elegant templates.

Importing documents from earlier versions of Freeway Pro broadly speaking worked fine, but there were glitches here and there with the text formatting. Versions of Freeway Pro before 4.0.4 seem to be a bit finicky when it comes to the application of styles to text, with the output varying, for example, depending on whether you italicised text using the Inspector, the Styles & Colours palette, or the Command-I keyboard shortcut. The result is that text that looked to be all of a piece in one version of Freeway can look decidedly odd in another.


Importing older documents is easy, but check especially for inconsistently formatted text.

Overall, performance was solid. On my 1 GHz G4 PowerBook, I didn’t notice any performance loss compared with Freeway Pro 3.5. Some specific features do seem to be slow, in particular searching for text strings in large documents, but that doesn’t appear to unusual for applications of this type. Similarly, typing in HTML items containing more than a few hundred words could become very slow, but again, that’s something I’ve experienced in other applications as well.

One aspect of the program that is noticeably faster than before is the uploading function. Previously, Freeway appeared to respond to changes made to a page by re-uploading not just the bit of a page that had changed but everything embedded into it, graphics, movies, even downloadable files linked within it. Obviously if all you’d done was change some of the text, having to watch Freeway uploading megabytes of files, and clogging your Internet connection in the process, was frustrating to say the least. Freeway Pro 4 seems to be much smarter, and uploading changes proceeds at a much brisker pace, apparently because it is much better at recognising what files have been changed and uploading only those.

User Interface

Freeway Pro sports a somewhat different interface in version 4 to the one it had a year or two back. A key new addition to the program is a Preview mode that allows you to get a visual impression of how the page you are working on will look. Things like links and download buttons don’t work, but as a quick-look tool to see how your design is coming together, this is a great tool.


A preview mode gives you a quick way to see how all your design elements are working out.

Another addition is a row of buttons on the top of the window that take the user to a variety of key tools. Some of these had their counterparts in earlier versions of Freeway, such as the Inspector palette, but others, like the ability to toggle CSS on and off, is new. Back and Forward buttons let you hop quickly between pages you’ve worked on recently, just as with a web browser. These are definitely useful, though I daresay some people will confuse them with Undo/Redo buttons at first.


Freeway Pro has an interface very similar to a standard page layout program such as Quark or InDesign.

Some minor changes that might not seem much but actually help a great deal are windows that respond to the scrolling wheels on mice, and contextual menus. Previous versions of Freeway didn’t allow the user either of these functions, and for fast-working Mac operators, both are major time-savers.

Really, my only gripe with the program is the interface, which is rather wasteful of screen space. Admittedly, this seems to be a feature of OS X apps generally, and indeed of OS X itself. Still, by removing the Sites palette, Softpress have made Freeway Pro a clumsy program to use on any computer with a resolution of 1280 by 854, or less; in other words, most Mac portables and many of the older iMacs. Instead of the Sites palette, there is a Sites view, but when visible it pushes the actual web page document off to one side, demanding either that you resize the screen hiding most of your Desktop, or lose sight of the right hand edge of the document.


Gone is the Spartan interface of version 3.5, and with it the helpful Sites palette.

New Features 1: Compatibility with .Mac

A big-ticket item for me, and anyone else with a .Mac account, will be compatibility with the iDisk. Freeway Pro will upload documents directly to an iDisk. When I was first trying this feature out using Freeway Pro 4.0.1 back in late 2005, I found it a bit flaky, but it now seems to be fast and stable. I’m not sure whether this was fixed by Softpress with their maintenance release of Freeway Pro 4.0.4, or by Apple expanding the bandwidth available to .Mac users, but either way, this feature is very cool and very useful.

New Features 2: Graphics

Freeway Pro has many clever features, many of which were discussed in the review of version 3.5 back in 2004. I shan’t go over those again here except to say that Freeway Pro is still one of the easiest ways to embed style text, multimedia files, and downloadable content into a single, attractive web site. No, what I shall concentrate on here are its graphics tools.

In earlier versions of Freeway Pro, the high-end graphics package was a bolt-on goody called a Fast Pack that users could buy from Softpress. These tools are now built into the program, and for most purposes at least, effectively make programs like Adobe Image Ready unnecessary. The key thing is that you can work with your graphic files in their original state, and leave Freeway to handle outputting them into JPEGs, GIFs, or PNGs as required. For example, adding drop shadows has hitherto been a laborious task requiring that you edit the graphic in Photoshop or Image Ready, and then import it into your document. Freeway Pro takes away the need for the image editor, and you simply add drop shadows on the fly using the Inspector palette. You can tweak the shadows in a variety of ways as well (colour, angle of the shadow, and so on). Adding borders to graphics, another oft-required edit previous carried out in a graphics app, can be done in Freeway Pro just as easily.


By applying and stacking graphical Actions, you can manipulate images on the fly and without the need for a high-end graphics application.

Changes that are more complex can be made to graphics by adding Actions. The Photo Magic action that allows you to set things like gamma and colour balance, while the Watermark action allows you to embed a graphical watermark, useful if you want to restrict usage of your images. Other visual tweaks include numerous ways to change the colours, add bevels to the edges of images, and apply a duotone filter. In short, there’s more than enough here for basic and not-so-basic image control. While graphics pros aren’t going to give up on Photoshop, casual and intermediate-level users will find these tools very useful and rewarding. One minus to all this graphical goodness is that you cannot group different images and apply identical actions to all of them.

New Features 3: Navigation

As with the inclusion of the Graphics Fast Packs in the new version of Freeway, so too does Freeway Pro now include a full set of button-making and navigation tools previously offered in the Button Fast Pack and optional Navigation Fast Pack. These include things like rollover buttons, navigation bars, and popup menus containing quick links to other pages on the site. These are generally straightforward to use, but one peculiarity was the limit on the number of items you can add to a navigation popup menu, twenty; I can see no obvious reason for this limit.


A site navigation popup can be quickly created and populated with links to other pages, but inexplicably you can only enter up to 20 items!

The best way to use these navigation tools and buttons is to add them in the master sheets. This way, as you expand or change your site, any changes to the navigation tools you make on the master sheets will be fed through to all the pages based on them.

Issues

As noted earlier on, you cannot search for HTML code directly, making it difficult to make across the board changes easily. To some degree, Freeway pre-empts many of these problems by allowing you to insert HTML code on an as-need basis. Still, there were times I found myself longing for a more direct way to edit the code. To take an example, at one point in developing my web site I decided to convert those links that opened into a new window to plain vanilla ones that didn’t. Sounds simple enough, but because you cannot edit the TARGET="_blank" code directly, you can’t search for the instances that you used it or perform a global search and replace.

This brings me to another issue, the lack of a progress bar on the Find & Replace tool. There’s no visual feedback at all, and my sense of Freeway when it was doing searches was that it was glacially slow. The result was that I had no idea if Freeway had simply ignored my command to perform a search or was actively working to find the items.

Finally, there’s but a single undo, an inexcusable shortcoming in a pro-level program of this complexity.

Bugs

I did encounter quite a few bugs while working on the version 4.0.1, but thankfully, they all seem to be fixed with version 4.0.4 so there’s no need to comment on them further. Stability is, generally, good, but any time I seemed to encounter the ‘spinning beach-ball of death’, Freeway crashed a second or two later. Therefore, while I would consider the program stable enough to be reliable and useful, it isn’t perfect.


Presumably a bug of some kind, but I have no idea what it’s about!

Conclusion

I remain a fan of Freeway Pro, and while I still use BBEdit and Dreamweaver on occasion, for the type of work I do, Freeway is easier and more efficient. It easily earns a four-bounce rating for being intuitive, powerful, and reliable. Price-wise, it compares very favourably with other applications in its class, and throw in the graphics tools as well, and it starts looking like a real bargain.

There are lots of HTML snobs out there who love to handcraft their code in a text editor, and that’s fine with me. But if you’re looking for a program that will allow you to create (rather than inherit and edit) a web site that looks good and will allow you lever all your InDesign and Quark experience, then Freeway Pro may well be just the thing.

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Softpress Systems Freeway 4 Pro

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