Making Good Time with
by John H. Farr

When the boss first offered a me chance to review SoftPress Systems' Freeway 1.0 web design software, I hesitated; I knew that the application was designed to appeal to desktop publishing pros already familiar with things like QuarkXPress and PageMaker, which I decidely was not. My own experience as a self-taught HTML-slinger had accustomed me to spend many hours tinkering with source code and enjoying every minute of it, kind of like adjusting the carburetors on a virtual vintage racer ("she's runnin' a little rough, better prop up the hood and take a look at the tags"). Nevertheless, I did accept the assignment, and while it's true that if you like to lay out pages, you're going to love Freeway, it's also true that this application can take you places you've never been before, especially if you're an spontaneous, creative person forced into the slow lane by HTML.

Freeway is aptly named, because it doesn't limp along hobbled by an ersatz word processor engine. It doesn't edit HTML directly, and you can't tinker with the code while you're working. Instead, using an interface familiar to users of DTP applications (so I'm told), Freeway creates a "document" for you to work with. You then select a page size, and place text, graphics, and multimedia content inside moveable, resizeable"GIF boxes" and "HTML text boxes" that you draw on the page with the tools provided (you can even make your own wildly-shaped boxes, as in the example below). After you've added all your links and gotten your web pages the way you want them, Freeway lives up to its name by sending all the contents into a destination folder, where everything arrives as individual HTML files, accompanied by all the GIF, JPEG, and web-ready multimedia files you've added to your pages. What you end up with is a web site folder ready to upload to your server, all gassed up and ready to roll.

Those are the dynamics. The real power in this application, however, is the way it handles graphic elements. If you draw a small square box, for example, and import a large image (automatically processed by Freeway into a GIF or JPEG), you get a cropped view with the box acting like a clear window onto the image. You can then reach in and slide the image around to get a different view, or you can shrink the image to fit the box. You can make the box bigger than the image, in which case if you resize the image to fit the box, you can get a nifty pixelated abstraction. All these tricks work with animated GIFs, too, of course. Just imagine: you can effectively crop out any part of an animation, grow it or shrink it, select it and move it all over the page. To watch it run, though, you have to select a browser from a Preview menu.

And now the fun begins: you can overlap as many of these resulting images as you want! What Freeway does is export a pile of GIFs or JPEGs, mixed or otherwise, as a single GIF or JPEG, based on the format of the rearmost image. And it's very entertaining to move all those images around on the page like you were arranging photos on the kitchen table. Since the end results of all this are HTML files, hypertext fiends can make use of Freeway to produce the source code for a complicated layout and then paste it anywhere they choose--after performing a few tricks to wrench the HTML out of the designated "Publish" folder!

You can also overlap animated GIFs, which Freeway will export as one big animation (see below), running at the same speed as the rearmost GIF. You can quickly create a copy of one of the animations, set the frame intervals with GIFBuilder, and hide it behind the others to act as a governor. Reshape, distort, and overlap several animations and you'll get all sorts of unpredictable combinations. For those of you who have a folder full of animated GIFs to play with, this can be a real hoot, as someone used to say. The example below is a 252 x 90 pixel animated GIF constructed in Freeway: I started with the large center animation, then drew custom GIF boxes and imported the same animation into each. Some items were sized to fit their boxes, some left normal size, and then all nine animations were overlapped in different ways, creating what Freeway calls an "image group," in this case an animated one.

To enter text on the page, Freeway gives you the option of using an HTML text box, which results in normal browser-rendered print, or typing directly into a GIF box, with full formatting and editing capabilies. You can then move, resize, and transform the results in countless different ways. If you're graphically oriented, the ability to instantly move objects around, overlap them, change background colors, resize, reshape, and modify virtually everything, usually with just a mouse-click or two, will keep you up past your bedtime. And yes, you can do some of these things with other applications, but with Freeway you end up with web pages.

Freeway makes it easy to build a series of successive pages and keep track of everything, too. And it has the horsepower to do amazing things: if you decide on a whim to overlap fields of HTML text (yes, you can do that), it instantly constructs the Mother of All Tables to arrange the text in various ways. The only real working drawback from a web designer's point of view is a certain awkwardness previewing pages in the browser of your choice, which you must have on your hard disk (and as for tinkering with the source code, you'd be better off going back to Freeway to move things around; anything else will land you in a wilderness of multiple table cells and clear GIFs). The way this software does the oddest and most complicated things so quickly, it sometimes makes me think it was designed by an alien intelligence of some sort. Quite the marvel.

Our trip down the road was handled by a Power Macintosh 8600/200 with 96 MB of RAM, running OS 8.0; to get onto Freeway you need at least a 68040 or PowerPC Macintosh (5 or 9 MB free RAM required) or Mac OS-compatible computer with System 7.5.1 or later. The application will take up a minimum of 20 MB on your hard disk and set you back $299 for a full-price single user license. It offers a fast way to build integrated, fully-functioning, graphically-complex web sites, and for that, noting the minor HTML-related limitations, it gets a solid recommendation from this reviewer.

PROS:	Encourages experimentation with magical graphics capability and easy page construction; makes seamless, integrated web sites; DTP interface is familiar to many.
CONS:	Creates complex, hard-to-edit HTML tables; does not support frames or dynamic HTML; installs GXGraphics extension that may cause conflicts.
CONCLUSION:	A powerful application with few faults that lets you quickly assemble an attractive web site. Well worth investigating if you are graphically-oriented and unfamiliar with HTML.

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July 05, 2009