Product Reviews

Conventional wisdom dictates that to produce professional Web sites you have to use 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, so the user can get on with 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. It makes frames, HTML layers and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) simple to use without compromising basic HTML work.

Just as in regular DTP tools, graphics are placed on Freeway pages inside boxes (made with rectangles, ovals or Bezier curves), where they can be scaled, cropped and rotated at will. This sets it apart from its rivals, which depend on other tools for even basic image processing. Freeway 3.0 imports native Illustrator and Photoshop files, layers and all, and places Flash and QuickTime straight onto the page, as well as PICT, TIFF, JPEG and GIF files.

Graphics can also be created on output from type placed in graphic boxes. This allows full access to all fonts and styles, as well as full XPress-level kerning and leading control and more. Graphic text is just styled type within Freeway, so it's simple to edit.

Freeway's graphic type controls are among the best in any design package, with direct support for fonts with rich character alternates, and 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 HTML 3.2+CSS or full HTML 4). Freeway captures any styles you set for graphic and HTML text, and shows them in a style sheet palette, where they can be applied to other text with a single click.

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

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are made by simply placing one item over another, applying 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 this has now been fixed. Documents open and save many times faster, even those with hundreds of complex pages.

Freeway generates HTML only when a document is previewed or published, which means it can concentrate on producing the most optimised code possible. When we tested a site created with Freeway (using websitegarage.netscape.com and www.gifwizard.com), we found its code and graphics to be the clearest produced by any HTML tool we've yet seen.

This does mean you can't directly edit HTML in your layout, so if you like writing and amending raw HTML as you work, Freeway isn't the tool for you. However, if you want to insert extra code or make repeatable customising tweaks and additions, there are two fairly painless methods to do this. The first 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 in version 2.0 to provide a way to add more complex code, with user-selectable options provided via a palette.

Freeway 3.0 takes Actions much further. There's now a built-in JavaScript interpreter, so Actions can contain JavaScript instructions to perform complex tasks automatically. For example, an Action can search for specific tags or text styles and build links using the data as part of the URLs for complex database search terms. Or it can 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.

Freeway 3.0 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.

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. 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.