Freeway Pro: Robust, Great Support, and Lacking - Finlay Dobbie

I'm not sure that it's designed purposefully to lock you in to Freeway per se, it's more a side-effect of how the Freeway workflow works. Your HTML doesn't exist AT ALL until you publish the site, upon which the HTML is generated from your Freeway document. This allows a much richer editing process because it's not bound by the restrictions of HTML (since it isn't).

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Wednesday, April 06 2005 @ 02:58 PM PDT

Freeway Pro: Robust, Great Support, and Lacking - thatkeith

Hi Marmaladew... Just a comment or two about the mention you made about the lack of code access:

First of all, this is largely true: the program presents a design environment rather than a programming one. This is because Freeway generates the most *optimised and robust* code its industrial-strength engine can create, each and every time you preview or publish. Idle messing around in code is what leads to inefficient, poorly structured page structure, so steering users towards high-level layout and production tasks and taking away the messy code-wrangling tasks is a Good Thing.

*(Note those two things: optimised AND robust. Good code will be efficient, but not to the detriment of different kinds of browsers. Freeway excels at making code which performs well in a wide range of browsers. Automatically.)

But if you do want to start putting in custom code, there are actually numerous options right there in the main interface. The Extended options allow extended attributes to be set up, Markup items let you slip in hand-woven snippets or large swathes of code anywhere in your layout (I find this wonderful when making PHP-driven pages), and there are other similar options on hand. (Including Source Code Snooper, a free add-on Action which gives direct access to code when you really need it!)

If you want to do something more interactive with the code then take a look at Freeway's Actions. These are able to take Freeway's output and customise it intelligently, using code logic, to deliver precisely what you want. You get a pile of Actions installed already, you can add third party ones if you use Freeway Pro, and you can even write your own.

There are two key and very cool things to remember about Actions. First of all, they are built with JavaScript and XML-style code, so any web programmer can write them. And second, unlike hand-written code which has to be inserted and tweaked each time you use it, they can be used wherever and whenever you like with zero effort.
Apply, pick a few options from the Actions palette, and get on with the important stuff.

(Oh, and the FAST Packs add features not even found in competing products, so it isn't really the case that Freeway is missing features without 'em! For example, the ability to make imported graphics transparent by percentage, generate custom edge effects, and even hand-tweak the individual color channels of an image in the page... you'll find them invaluable when you have 'em, but that's hardly basic stuff! :-)

I hope this helps explain a few thing!

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Friday, April 08 2005 @ 03:58 AM PDT

Freeway Pro: Robust, Great Support, and Lacking - MacVet-0SXNeophyte

RE: I takes a half hour to upload...it doesn't seem to know what was changed....
NOT MY EXPERIENCE....

FREEWAY and upload:
...it DOES only upload what has been changed...and should take very little time to upload....I am in and out after a change in less than 10 minutes, right from adding content to checking the links on line....maybe something in your setup or pref files needs tweaking...may be it is set somewhere to do a complete/fresh upload each time....that is not stanard practice.....I LOVE THE UPLOADING FEATURE ESPECIALLY....I had to buy FETCH to upload my GOLIVE files as I couldn't do what I wanted with their built in uploading feature....with out getting down and dirty in the file heirarchy and uploading as a complete site...rather than a page at a time.

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Friday, April 07 2006 @ 10:22 AM PDT