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Conventional wisdom says that to produce professional Web sites you have to get elbow-deep in code. But anyone who's tried SoftPress Freeway knows this is rubbish. Freeway is a Web site production tool with a vital difference; the program handles the code, letting the user get on with the job of creating the site.
Rather than reinventing the wheel, Freeway takes tried-and-tested desktop publishing concepts and rebuilds them for Web production. Anyone with QuarkXPress experience will take to Freeway immediately. In fact, Freeway uses many XPress keyboard shortcuts. But this doesn't mean it's locked into a print-oriented world view; it was designed from the ground up to work with the unique features of the Web, from flexible 'page' dimensions to dynamic content. Using frames, HTML layers and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is made simple, but without compromising more basic, compatible HTML work.
Just as in regular DTP tools, graphics are placed on Freeway pages inside boxes (made with rectangles, ovals or Beziér curves), where they can be scaled, cropped and rotated at will. (This immediately sets it apart from its competition, which depend on other tools for even basic image processing.) TIFF, EPS and PICTs as well as GIF and JPEGs have always been supported, and now Freeway 3 reads native Illustrator and Photoshop files, layers and all, and places Flash and QuickTime straight onto the page.
Graphics can also be created on output from type placed in graphic boxes. This allows full access to all available fonts and styles, as well as full XPress-level kerning and leading control and more. Graphic text is just styled type within Freeway, so editing it is simple.
Freeway's graphic type controls are among the best in the design industry, with direct support for fonts with rich character alternates as well as the typographic control that a designer deserves. The HTML type features support regular font tags (when the page encoding is set to basic HTML 3.2 level) and full CSS styles (when the page is set to the innovative HTML 3.2+CSS option or full HTML 4). Freeway captures any set styles for graphic and HTML text and shows them in a stylesheet palette, where they can be applied to other text with a single click.
Web-ready graphics are generated without the need for outside help. Images and graphic text are output as JPEGs or GIFs as required, with the user's choice of optimisation settings. A Graphics Preview option provides interactive feedback for choosing the right level of JPEG compression or GIF colour reduction. This means designers can make decisions on quality levels while seeing things right there in the layout.
Rollovers are made by simply placing one item over another, applyng a rollover setting, and picking the behaviour options from a palette. Slicing images is done by drawing empty boxes over an image and setting them not to combine. Freeway then generates the image in the appropriate parts with no further intervention. Apply links and rollovers to the boxes and you get interactive rollover image maps.
Previous versions of Freeway could get bogged down with larger sites, but Freeway 3 seems to have fixed this problem. Documents open and save many times faster, even those with hundreds of complex pages.
Just because code-twiddling isn't the way it works doesn't mean Freeway can't be taken seriously by professional site builders. Freeway generates HTML only when a document is previewed or published, which means it can concentrate on producing the most optimised code possible. In fact, according to Web sites such as www.gifwizard.com and websitegarage.netscape.com, Freeway's default output is actually the cleanest in the industry by a substantial margin.
If a user wants to extend Freeway's code output there are fairly painless ways to do this. The first method is by simply adding extended parameters to existing parts of the layout, whether pages, form elements or links. Pick the Extended option for whatever you're working with and create custom parameters and values at will - these are built into the code on output.
Freeway's Actions are more flexible than simple extended code parameters. Actions were introduced with Freeway 2 to provide a way to add more complex code, with user-selectable options provided via an Actions palette. This allowed for dynamic code generation for linking sites to databases or configuring different forms of embedded multimedia. Freeway 3 takes Actions much further; there's now a complete JavaScript interpreter built into the application, so Actions can contain JavaScript and AppleScript instructions to perform complex logic-based tasks automatically. For example a Freeway 3 Action could search for specific tags or text styles and build links using the found data as part of the URLs, perhaps for complex database search terms. Or it could automatically pull records from a FileMaker database and replace placeholder content with real data whenever the site is published.
The beauty of Actions is the way they take complex, tedious technical tasks, wrap them in a simple user interface, and make then effortlessly repeatable. Basic Actions can be written by anyone with an understanding of HTML and an ounce of common sense, but if you want to produce intelligent JavaScript-based Actions you'll need a grasp of JavaScript as well. If this seems daunting, don't worry - actually using Actions requires no coding skills at all.
Freeway 3 ships with 25 Actions covering things from timers, layer animation and random sequence generators to navigation pop-up menus and a range of redirection tricks. New ones from SoftPress and Freeway users are posted on the SoftPress Web site, and custom Action solutions regularly appear on the Freeway mailing list.
Freeway 3.0 quite simply takes Web design to a new level. It's the only true designer-friendly Web site tool, and is clearly as powerful as the better-known and more technically challenging competition. It's also cheaper, and users get excellent technical support. If you don't think in code Freeway lets you compete with the best, effortlessly. If you do, Freeway's Actions will let you perform magic.
Keith Martin
Freeway's graphics generation features allow in situ optimising of images and graphic text, simplifying the whole Web production process.
The Link view provides a useful overview of your whole site, and is navigated by clicking through the different page links.
Actions can perform simple tasks such as rollovers, or they can be written to pull data from external databases and produce Web sites from product inventories on the fly.
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