December 1st, 1997

The Skinny [The Bottom Line:] FreeWay brings a tried-and-true metaphor-the pasteboard- to HTML page generation. Its interface is more like PageMaker and Quark than Home Page or PageMill. While some understanding of the basic concepts of Web site design are still needed, FreeWay allows DTP designers to move into the WWW age with a minimum of pain. PROS Taking advantage of the powerful pasteboard metaphor and Apple's often-ignored GX technology, FreeWay supports multiple master pages, ruler guides, precision placement of text and graphics, Net-safe color selection, character and paragraph style sheets, layered items, anti-aliased text, text flow between frames, rotation and skewing of graphic and text elements, plug-in and applet support, and GUI form creation. CONS Unable to import existing sites. A few crash-causing bugs during import and GIF text creation, as well as a bug involving the import of applets. No support for automatic uploading of WWW sites. The required GXGraphics extension can prevent some software from functioning properly. ToolTips or Balloon Help would clarify some of the more cryptic palettes and dialog boxes. Unable to leave items on the pasteboard to transfer from page to page. Only single-level Undo/Redo. Cannot preview applets or plug-ins in FreeWay. FreeWay 1.0 Processor: 68k and PowerPC Memory Needs: 5-9MB Hard Drive Space: 10MB Price: $299 Publisher: SoftPress Systems www.softpress.com by: Jon Bodner (jbodner@webintosh.com) Just as the Mac II and the LaserWriter created the desktop publishing revolution, the widespread use of the Internet has started to spell its end. Desktop Publishing professionals wanting to use familiar tools have been stuck with poor alternatives, like PageMaker's HTML export features. FreeWay from SoftPress may be the first program to bridge the gap. At first glance, FreeWay seems more like QuarkXPress than Claris Home Page. Many of the other GUI HTML editors have used variations on a word processor for their metaphor. Eventually, this analogy fails, since WWW sites are composed of discrete pages rather than a continuous document. FreeWay's use of the desktop publishing tool might be more esoteric, but it certainly fits the job. One of the guiding principles of FreeWay is that it requires no knowledge of HTML to produce a site. By and large, it does succeed. Just like a page layout program, you can place ruler guides and grids on-screen, draw frames to contain text or graphics, use drag and drop to place graphics, text, and plug-ins, link frames to flow text from one frame to another, even lay out HTML forms graphically. The only failing of the interface is that items left on the "pasteboard" are not made global, as they are in PageMaker. Besides this interface oddity, the only drawback to the design tools are the lack of tool tips or balloon help for the palettes and dialog boxes. While there is plenty of HTML help provided, contextual help is vital for climbing the learning curve from novice to expert. Of course, an awareness of the features and limitations of HTML are important for proper Web design. The manner in which FreeWay treats text is one example. Text can be created in an HTML frame or a GIF frame. HTML text is limited to the standard HTML styles, fonts, formatting, and sizes. Furthermore, HTML frames can only be rectangular. GIF text possesses no such limitations; any Mac formatting and font can be used, the frames can be rectangles, ovals, or polygons, and the text can be anti-aliased, rotated or skewed to boot. As you might guess from the name, GIF text is capable of these wonders because it is converted by FreeWay into an image. You are left with a familiar WWW design tradeoff: faster download times versus more visually interesting text. The features which FreeWay provides come with tradeoffs. Sticking to the desktop metaphor means discarding HTML concepts which do not fit and replacing them with their analogs from desktop publishing. One missing feature is frames; they are replaced by master pages. This is a dual-edged sword. While the master pages are far more powerful and provide a more seamless environment, common elements (such as a navigation bar at the side of the screen) must be reloaded for each page, increasing page rendering time. The trade-off is probably worth it, given that frames have always had their detractors in the WWW design community. Other missing features include dynamic HTML and cascading style sheets. While there is no substitute for dynamic HTML (and the current confusion in the DHTML arena makes this a minor concern), FreeWay's own style sheets provide a good compromise: ease of use for the designer combined with a uniform look for the end-user. Style sheets can be defined on the character or paragraph level, and can encompass virtually all of the standard page layout controls, when using GIF text. However, there are two standard style sheet features which are missing: inheritance and linking. It is not possible to specify that one style is based on another, and it is also not possible to automatically change to a specified style at the end of a paragraph. There were no major bugs, but there were two non-reproducible crashes while working in FreeWay: once while importing a text file and again while adding text to a GIF frame. We also noticed a problem when importing an applet. The name of the applet's class file was truncated, which rendered the tag useless. Hopefully, these errors can be corrected in a bug-fix release. Other small problems were related to the use of Apple's GXGraphics extension. While GXGraphics supplies some of the most powerful graphical features in FreeWay (such as the anti-aliasing of text, automatic joins of overlapping graphics, rotation and skewing), some applications get confused by GXGraphics and think that the now-abandoned QuickDraw GX is installed. Versions of Acrobat before 3.0.1 and PageMaker will generate error messages, as will outdated versions of Apple's Desktop Printing software. Updating to the latest versions should solve these problems. Overall, we liked FreeWay a lot more than the other GUI HTML site design programs we've tried. It might be because it reminded us of working in PageMaker, but more importantly, FreeWay never made us feel that there was a need to tweak by hand (given the complicated HTML table code it produces, it would have been nearly impossible anyway). The most important feature which FreeWay is missing is the ability to import existing sites, though given FreeWay's design philosophy, this is probably not possible. If you're a DTP expert who wants to move to the WWW, FreeWay's your best bet. Even if you've never used the simplest page layout software, FreeWay's power just might make you a convert.