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tripdragon's picture
417 pencils

Freeway 4 prerelease


Now this is an app that has a LONG time coming as a new update. Suffice it to say I am only hopeful at this point that this app is a knock out css design app. We shall see.

http://www.softpress.com/en/home

Oxford, UK

September 2nd, 2005

Softpress releases Preview of Freeway 4 Pro

Today Softpress released a Preview version of Freeway 4 Pro, the flagship for the next generation of Softpress' no-need-to-code website development products. Freeway 4 Pro continues the tradition of offering professionals the best possible design environment coupled with the most powerful tools for the creation and assembly of Web content.

Among the host of new features:

  • extended CSS layout capability-with support for absolute, relative and fixed positioning, and fully hierarchical page layouts,
  • standards compliant XHTML output-both Strict and Transitional,
  • Unicode support for multi-lingual sites,
  • improved transparency/opacity handling,
  • a wide range of new built-in graphical and type effects,
  • and support for Apple's Spotlight technology.

"With Freeway 4 Pro, designers can finally create fully standards-compliant sites employing advanced CSS layouts," commented Richard Logan, Softpress' Managing Director. "They can even mix diverse character sets on the same page, and there's still no need to write any code."

AVAILABILITY

Freeway 4 Pro Preview is a fully functional trial expiring on the 16th of October, 2005 and is available as a free download today from the Softpress web site at http://www.softpress.com

tripdragon's picture
417 pencils

update,,, no likely... D@M $%&%^%^^&&*( IT !

ARRRRG What is it about css that is so D@M hard to code and control visually ! :(

(no not like cssedit from mac rabbit) Sorry for the rant, but I swear developers just dont get it.

Ivan's picture

I belive in hand coding, but wouldn't mind a good wysiwyg application. Sometimes I use Style Master to check my code for compatibility, but I open it less and less as I learn more CSS. If there was an editor that would automatically take care of all the IE and other browser hacks that would be a winner, but I guess it would be exremely hard to do.

tripdragon's picture
417 pencils

yeah I find that the only way I can make a site work is to code it in taco now. :( But I really really want a vissual css tool, something that lets you do two three things, edit code, draw element boxes, and see and have control handels of the padding-margin-and width/height of the box. How hard is that to figure out visually ??

Oh, also how did you condense the the text to a read page ?

Ivan's picture

you can insert a <!--break--> anywhere you want to break the page.

tripdragon's picture
417 pencils

sweet! now I will not feel so bad when posting huge stuff,, ya know for some one that shates typeing I sure type a lot :P

r0sss's picture
35 pencils

if you need a program to write code for you then you shouldnt be a web designer...No matter what these programs say they can do you'll never fully get what you would out of a website unless you code by hand.

** I just went to their own site and it's built entirely with tables- haha - That's funny.
and.....All the sites they show in the portfolio that have been built using this thing are in tables and frames.

tripdragon's picture
417 pencils

Ya I know that to be true, but come on, there has to be a some designer turned coder that can see the usefull ness of a good desgin app that could out put code.

Hrmph, I think I will update my demo design mockup a bit soon and see if I can find the gold again.. *old version http://www.aprilcolo.com/oh/chimp/spots/csstweek/ *

Remember, code is a good thing but visual tools are also good things,

topStyler's picture
16 pencils

Oh GOD not another What Crap You See is the SHIT You Get application. Why can't somone develop a super cool tag editor on the MAC.

mijlee's picture
486 pencils

BBedit is still the only way to code on the Mac. I use this in conjunction with CSSEdit and that satisfies all my needs. Both come with live preview windows so I can code and see what my alterations are doing to the page.

At work I use dreaweaver for regular updating jobs but hate it so might look at this as a replacement.

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http://mijlee.com
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neilio's picture
8 pencils

One of the few reasons to integrate Dreamweaver into your workflow is for its file management capabilities. I never use it, but who wants to send 30 minutes updating pages when you need to relocate an image file to a different folder? I handcode everything in BBEdit and CSSEdit (as mijlee mentioned) and then if I ever need to move files around, I do it in DW and let it handle rewriting all of the links or source pointers.

--
Slumming at the BeatnikPad: http://www.beatnikpad.com/

Tim Vandecasteele's picture
3 pencils

I just use SubEthaEdit and it fulfills all my needs.
Can someone tell me the big advantage of BBEdit over SubEthaEdit, as it costs so much more.

(I use SubEthaEdit only for non-commercial use so for me it's even free)

Ivan's picture

I use TextWrangler and it's free and perfect for my needs. I would like to know if I'm missing something by not using BBEdit. Tx!

mijlee's picture
486 pencils

The main difference is the automated tool bar for basic HTML editing, which not only saves time but also reduces the amount of errors that you make. It gives you direct access to insert standard HTML/XHTML tags and you can even right your own using the glossaries. Also there is an entities panel with which you can select special characters and insert them with their correct ASII codes.

there is a much more advanced search and replace function, including a multi file system that is better than anything else I have ever used. You can compare documents and make changes on the differences.

It has a live preview window that uses the apple web.

Extensive validation built in for HTML and XHTML including the new addition of HTMLTidy.

Basically it is a proper HTML/XHTML/CSS/PHP editor as a posed to an extended text editor.

Here is Barebones own comparison between BBEdit and TextWrangler.

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http://mijlee.com
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Ivan's picture

Thanks a lot mijlee. I'll certainly give it a try.

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