 |
Previous versions of Freeway have thrilled designers around the world with a combination of print-quality typography, precision page layout and superb image control. Freeway 5.5, with over 70 new or improved features, raises the stakes even higher.
What is Freeway?
Simply the fastest and easiest way to assemble content and create stunning, standards-compliant websites. Freeway is THE total solution for professionals and home users. Powerful and intuitive, Freeway is full of features like advanced graphic handling, graphic text on-the-fly, the ability to employ dynamic content and database integration and so much more. And you never need to write code.
Real CSS Control
Freeway 5.5 Pro can be used to create CSS (table-less) page layouts using absolute positioning, and exposes the real power of CSS through relative positioning, percentage scaling of all elements, partial styles, and more, and all with the legendary Freeway WYSIWYG design view.
HTML Lists
Freeway 5.5 has improved support for HTML lists. Most importantly, it is now possible to create nested listslists within lists. There is also a new streamlined method for creating lists in the Inspector Palette.
HTML box background effects
Freeway 5.5 can apply background effects to HTML items. This allows you to set graphic effects on HTML items that are similar to those that can be applied to graphic items (see Graphic Effects.) You can use this feature to create HTML boxes with translucent backgrounds, borders, glows, and shadows.
Sliced background images
Freeway 5.5 has an option for slicing background images so that they can be used to apply a border or effect to an HTML item. This allows you to create HTML boxes with decorative borders, or shadows, or translucent backgrounds etc.
Graphic Box Effects
Freeway 5.5 includes two graphic effects (Inner Shadow and Inner Glow) and has an improved interface for applying effects to graphic items. This is similar to the interface for applying background effects to HTML items. There are five effects to choose from: Outer Shadow, Inner Shadow, Outer Glow, Inner Glow, and Foreground.
Editable Graphic Text
Use any font installed on your Mac to create graphic headlines or other decorative elements. All of the effects above can be applied to the texteven on a character by character basis. Use advanced kerning, tracking, baseline shift, and more to refine your typographical message. Use any color or combination of colors you like. When you publish, a graphic will be created out of the text. The text remains editable within Freeway.
Transparency
Freeway 5.5 takes the idea of a fully transparent graphic compositing engine to the next level. Any object on the page, even characters of type, can have transparency or variable opacity. When you overlap two transparent objects, Freeway will either composite them together, or maintain them as separate layered objects in the final layout. Anti-aliasing to blend overlapping colors is automatically calculated. Freeway 5.5 Pro supports transparent images from Photoshop, Illustrator and Freehand, Fireworks, and many other applications.
Unicode
Unicode text allows you to mix characters from many languages within a single line of text. Visitors to your site don’t need to have special fonts for each language, or to select the page language from a listit just works. Each Unicode font can contain tens of thousands of characters or glyphs.
Standards-compliant
Designing with standards means that you can trust that a modern browser will always render your pages consistently. It also means that you can create designs that work well for visually disabled visitors using “speaking” browsers, or cell-phone/PDA users, or new platforms yet to be invented. Even create XHTML Strict without a trip to MIT for a Master’s degree
Internet Explorer compatibility
Microsoft Internet Explorer is the most commonly used browser on Windows computers, but it has a number of limitations in its support for web standards. Freeway 5.5 provides three levels of Internet Explorer compatibility. Internet Explorer 7 has greatly improved support for web standards in comparison with Internet Explorer 6, which is used by a shrinking number of people.
New interface
Carefully designed to make it easier to focus on your design, while keeping everything you need close at hand. The redesigned Inspector dynamically resizes itself to present just the tools you need for the current selection The Site panel makes it easy to create pages or folders, and to organize your site quickly. It even supports Finder like color labelling to help you flag pages for action or to signify functionality.
The configurable toolbar allows you to personalize Freeway to your own working style. Contextual pop-up menus come to life with a Control-click (or right-click on a multi-button mouse) and present the most-used options for the current selection. Scroll wheel support allows you to blaze through large documents. Dynamic Site Panel allows site arrangement, drag & drop, object selection and more. Page Preview using the same rendering engine as Apple Safaricheck a page in a genuine browser view without publishing your entire site
Other notable features
•Email adress obfuscation to help keep the spammers away
•Link styles - change the colour of links in any CSS item
•Save Archive - create an archive of your site for backup or transporation
•Improved margin and grids
•Built-in preview within Freeway (Safari/Webkit)
•Quick Look compatibility in Mac OS X 10.5-6
•Spotlight compatibility in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and beyond
Improved graphics handling
Full EPS (Panther & later), Illustrator, Photoshop layered file import
Graphic box effects, Text effects - shadow, glow, emboss, blur, scatter
Vector effects (wobble and crack), Border types (dashing, dotted)
Improved transparency (opacity) options
Graphics and Graphics Extra FAST packs are built into Freeway 5.5:
Sharpen, Blur, Watermark, ChromaKey, Duotone, Fade, FillMaster, PhotoFrame, PhotoMagic, Posterize, Scan Lines, Solarize, Sharpen, Saturate, Linear Blur, Impress, Hue Rotate, ChromaKey, Advanced Fade
Code output
Unicode for truly multilingual sites; mix languages on the same page, even on the same line. Unicode keyboards, Unicode filenames
Encodings/import encodings/Auto/UTF8
Generate standards-compliant XHTML (Strict and Transitional), HTML 3.2, HTML 4
Output options on “By Page” basis
CSS
CSS Layout - CSS layout items - control over CSS/table layout
Child items, relative and absolute items, percentage positions and sizes
CSS borders, padding and margins
CSS styling with partial styles and tag styles
Create and use external style sheets
Full style management
Freeway Showcase
Showcase lets you create a gallery or slideshow from scratch in minutes, with literally thousands of fully-customizable options.
Secure and Improved FTP
The file upload abilities of Freeway 5.5 have been totally overhauled. Freeway now supports secure uploads using SFTP (technically known as SSH File Transfer Protocol) as well as FTPS (also known as FTP Secure and FTP-SSL).
Relative Page Layout Action (Pro)
Automatically convert absolute layouts to relative in-flow layouts! Apply the RPL Action to a blank page (before you start designing) or to a layered design you've already made, and your page will work perfectly as a relative in-flow layout in all modern browsers, expanding gracefully with added content (including footers) and changes in browser display size.
Simple Site Search (Pro)
Allow users to search your web site with the Simple Site Search Action. Every aspect of the search is customizable to suit your site design. Choose the font, colors and layout options and leave Freeway to create the perfect search experience for your site.
Amazon Associates
Start making some money from your web site with the Amazon Associates Actions. Simply sign up for a free account, apply the Actions to your Freeway pages and decide what from the vast array of products at Amazon you want to offer your visitors.
HTML Email Creation
The Create Email Action simplifies the production process of creating an HTML based newsletter by applying a number of alterations to the underlying code of your Freeway page to ensure it has the best chance of displaying correctly in as many email clients as possible.
|
|
|
|
Some of Freeway’s powerful and unique features include:
MULTIPLE MASTER PAGES
Designing a Web site using master pages is one of the keys to the amazing level of productivity that can be achieved with Freeway. Master pages are used for repeating features such as layout, navigation bars, page backgrounds and graphic elements. Use as many different master pages as required.
LAYOUT TOOLS
Including transformation, zoom, guide and ruler features, all with both graphical and numeric controls for accurate positioning. Content can be placed in overlapping boxes, text on graphic, text on text, graphic on graphic, even text on animated GIFs! Drag and drop directly into Freeway from most applications (for example iPhoto, iTunes, Extensis Portfolio, iView Media Pro, and so on).
LINK MAP
Provides a complete overview of the hyperlinks that connect each page in a site. Hyperlinks made within the site are automatically tracked and are impossible to break accidentally.
Although not reflected in the Link Map, Freeway also allows you to edit the hyperlinks and change backgrounds in Flash movies directly in the layout.
Link Styles
Freeway 5.5 has an improved user interface for setting link styles, and allows you to set link styles on CSS items as well as pages.
•Select a page or CSS item
•Change to the Appearance pane of the Inspector palette.
•In the Links section, choose link colors from the color popup menus and/or select the underline state you would like. |
|