Freeway 2.0 offers many important new features to bring it ever closer to the capabilities of its two larger, fiercer competitors, GoLive and Dreamweaver. This second release offers support for HTML 4.0 layout and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and boasts new, fully-customizable actions technology, similar to GoLive's actions or Dreamweaver's behaviors, to create special functionality such as rollovers, QuickTime controls, database connectivity, and Shockwave Director and Flash controls. Freeway comes loaded with 15 actions, and more are available free of charge from Softpress' web site. If an action isn't available, members of Freeway's mailing list often courteously provide an action to fufill another member's needs. Freeway 2.0 also introduces support for frames, anchors, user-defined tables, HTML import , and FTP capability, features missing from the initial release which made many designers hesitant to adopt the product. With 2.0's new features, there's now little reason to hesitate.

From the start, Freeway has been marketed as the web development tool for graphic designers because it borrows heavily from QuarkXPress. Freeway's palettes, interface, tools, page metaphor and functions resemble Quark's. Those familiar with Quark will note the similarities immediately. Freeway uses boxes to place text and graphics, like Quark. Freeway also imports the most common image formats, including TIFF, GIF, JPEG, PNG, PICT, BMP and EPS. Freeway's character and paragraph styles resemble Quark's. Freeway's text boxes, like Quark's, can be linked and unlinked to flow text from one box to another. Freeway's color, site, and styles palettes and dialogue boxes, too, resemble Quark's. Freeway, again like Quark, also offers page magnification, rulers, guides, margin guides, and grids, and the ability to snap objects to them for precise, pixel perfect placement. Freeway also offers a Quark-like pen tool to create and edit bezier curves. For power users, Freeway takes advantage of Quark's default shortcut keys as well. Like a Quark document, a Freeway document is likely to be a complete project, i.e. a complete web site.

Freeway's resemblance to Quark is immediately empowering. Many designers will feel some familiarity the first time they run the software. They will be able to create new pages and insert text and graphics to produce a simple web site in only a few hours with the skills they already possess. This alone will encourage them to explore Freeway's capabilities, consult the manual, learn more about the finer points of web design, and possibly join the Freeway mailing list. Although Freeway offers hundreds of choices and options that most print designers have not faced, it comes closest to successfully translating their skills and experience to the web.

Freeway's likeness to Quark provides two significant capabilities that make Freeway users more productive than other designers using GoLive or Dreamweaver. When a designer needs to borrow images from pre-existing electronic documents, Freeway makes the task easy. Instead of re-sampling an image in an image editor to be used on the web, Freeway users can place their images, web ready or not, directly into Freeway, decide whether they should be pass-throughs, GIF, JPEG or PNG images, and preview the images at assorted compression settings for best results. Screenshots, in particular, are easy to use in Freeway. Simply make it and import it. Incidentally, all the usual cropping, rotation, scaling tools and shortcut key combinations so popular in Quark are available in Freeway. Unfortunately, transparent GIFs and animated GIFs cannot be created in Freeway, so they must be imported if they are to have transparency or animation.

For graphic text, designers usually turn to an image editor and dutifully begin working, churning out whatever text must be an image. If this text changes, back to the image editor they go to set their text as graphics. Freeway, however, eliminates this process entirely. Any text keyed or imported into Freeway can be specified to export as HTML text or a GIF. Absolutely any text. To simplify this process, users need only create a style to be applied to characters or paragraphs throughout the site to make them render as anti-aliased images in the selected font at the selected size when the site is exported. This text is completely editable in Freeway at all times, so changes are a snap. When the site is next exported, the changed text is rendered as specified. If the text needs changed again, the designer simply changes it and exports the site again. This feature alone is nearly worth purchasing Freeway. It is a time saving, memory saving, money saving godsend. No more smudged, ragged sticky notes to remind users which font and size they should be using. Freeway does this work for them.

Actions are another time-saver in Freeway, and are much like GoLive actions and Dreamweaver behaviors. Freeway actions, like their counterparts in GoLive and Dreamweaver, are completely customizable. Freeway actions are text files that contain a hybrid of HTML, XML-like commands and JavaScript that, when used, insert code into the Freeway page to enable the action when the page is published. Actions are a paradox in Freeway, however, because they require knowledge of scripting to write or customize. Although Freeway is targeted at graphic designers, most graphic designers will not have the skills necessary to alter or write actions without assistance. Luckily, the Freeway mailing list is a great resource for just this kind of assistance.

Freeway ships with 15 useful actions, and more are available free of charge from Softpress' web site. Out of the box, Freeway provides actions to create rollovers; hide, show and move layers; insert multimedia objects for Director, Flash and QuickTime; play background music; and redirect pages after a specified period of time or to load an appropriate frameset. From Softpress' web site, users can download dozens more produced by Softpress, including actions for links to Acrobat PDFs, drop down menus, user logins, image reset buttons, sound rollovers, JavaScript passwords, lasso actions, multiple forms on a page, popup windows, and random sequence images. If this isn't enough, there are nearly a dozen more actions written by active members of the Freeway mailing list. These user actions display the current date, close windows, provide a country list popup menu, spawn new windows and display link status in the status bars of browsers. As mentioned before, if an action does not perform a particular task, or no action exists for a particular task, the more experienced members of the Freeway mailing list will often step up and provide an altered or new action.

Freeway's most used actions are, predictably, rollover actions, since rollovers are the most used interactive feature on the Internet. The rollover actions which ship with Freeway are the Simple Rollover, Rollover, Rollover Button and Text Rollover. The Simple Rollover, applied to an existing image on the page, provides only three variables, but one of them is the option to preload the rollover. The Rollover action, also applied to an existing graphic image, provides the most variables, including slave controls. The Rollover Button is inserted as an object itself and not applied to an existing object, with its two rollover states selected in the Inspector Palette. In addition, a Text Rollover action, which creates HTML text triggers to activate image changes in slave chains, can be downloaded from the Softpress web site. A fourth rollover, NEW Rollover Button, with the same features as the Rollover Button, is developed through the actions tutorial in the Freeway manual.

Despite the power of Freeway's actions, they have two minor but troubling limitations. Only one action can be effectively attached to each item. If users attach a second action, both actions are shown attached to the item, but only the action attached first will function. For a rollover to change an image other than the image to which it is attached, users will need to rely on the Rollover action which uses slave chains. Unfortunately, there's no mention of slave chains anywhere in the Freeway manual or Freeway's online help system. The only references to slave chains are found in the About Freeway Actions folder, installed when Freeway's installed, and on Freeway's web site, in several of the tutorials available there. The HTML documentation in the About Freeway Actions folder discuss Slave Image, Slave Load Frame, Slave Show/Hide Layer, and Slave Show/Hide Image actions in detail and clearly explain how to use slave chains. The tutorials at the Softpress web site are less helpful regarding slave chains, but helpful nonetheless. The tutorial for Multiple Rollovers, for example, demonstrates multiple rollovers using slave chains. It is nevertheless unfortunate that slave chains are not documented in the Freeway manual, since this is the first place new users will go for answers to their questions.

The variables for actions appear in the Inspector Palette, which is context sensitive. When an action item has is selected, the action tab appears in the Inspector Palette, showing the settings for the action. To change the settings for an action, users need only click the action item and change the variables in its action tab. Few things are simpler.

Basic Site Palette

Frameset Dialogue Box

Hyperlink Dialogue Box

Hyperlink Shortcut

Anchor Shortcut

Sample Form Layout

Form Setup Dialogue Box

Linked Text Boxes

Knockout Text Feature

Foreground Text Feature

Pen Tool (Image)

Pen Tool (Text)

The Inspector Palette is the most used palette in Freeway, and perhaps the most important. Using the Inspector Palette, users specify attributes for actions, graphics, text, tables, table cells, page appearance, page behaviors, item export, horizontal rules, framesets, individual frames, and form elements. When an item is selected, the Inspector Palette displays tabs for all attributes related to the item. If nothing on a page is selected, the tabs for page appearance and page behavior appear in the Inspector. If the page has an action associated with it, an action tab will also appear. If a graphic item with an action is selected, the Inspector will display the graphics tab, the actions tab, and the item tab. If text is selected, the Inspector will display the export tab, the item tab and the text tab. The Inspector Palette is an elegant solution to what might otherwise be long, confusing reference cards, menus or toolbars.

Another important palette is the Site Palette. Essentially, the Site Palette lists all the pages in a Freeway document, much like the document palette in QuarkXPress. Master Pages are listed at the top of the Site Palette, separated from the standard pages with a horizontal rule. Users can elect to view all links or all items in each page in the Site Palette. Users can also elect to view the file sizes for each page and the elements in them, including graphics. The Site Palette can be used to navigate the site, and pages can be inserted or deleted as well using the Site Palette pop-up menu. The Site Palette, like the Inspector Palette, is an important and useful tool in Freeway.

Frames are a welcome addition to Freeway 2.0. Framesets are created using the pop-up menu from the Frames Palette. The resulting dialogue box provides 16 different frameset layouts from which to choose, nearly any layout the user will need. Users can also name the frameset from this dialogue box, and elect to have Freeway automatically create new pages to populate the frames. But users aren't necessarily locked into these initial choices. The Frame sources and layouts can be changed at any time using the Frames Palette. Users can also customize the noframes content, which appears if a visitor cannot view frames, for whatever reason. The Frames Palette shows the active frameset in miniature, with the selected frame darkened. Users select frames by either clicking on the frame in the Freeway window or clicking the miniature frame in the Frames Palette.

While many attributes for a frameset can be accessed from the Frames Palette, the Inspector Palette allows users to change attributes related to its appearance. The frame attributes tab allows users to change the orientation of the frameset between horizontal and vertical, to select another source page for the selected frame, to rename the frame, to set its size in pixels or percentage, to enable its noresize option, and to enable or disable scrolling for that frame. In contrast, the frameset appearance tab, like the page appearance tab, allows users to alter the frameset's appearance, i.e. to name the frameset, rename the file name, and set the frameset's borders.

Anchors are yet another useful addition to Freeway 2.0. An anchor can be attached to text or to an item, but not to text that will be exported as a GIF. To make an anchor, users simply select the text or item that will host the anchor, selects EDIT:ANCHOR, and enters the name for the anchor in the anchor dialogue box. Anchors are renamed and deleted using the same dialogue box. Items that have anchors attached to them are indicated by a small blue anchor icon on the Freeway page.

Hyperlinks, like most other procedures in Freeway, are simple to create. There are two ways to create hyperlinks in Freeway: 1) use the Hyperlink dialogue box or 2) use the shortcuts in the status area at the bottom of the Freeway window. From the EDIT:HYPERLINK dialogue box, users elect to link to a page in the Freeway document, to a page or site on the Internet, or to a new Freeway page that will be created once the dialogue box is closed, and elect whether the link will have a target, either _parent, _top, _blank, _self or a frame. To link to an anchor in the Freeway document, the user selects the page which contains the anchor from the Freeway page list and then selects the appropriate anchor from the context-sensitive drop down menu below the page list. The link will display in the status area at the bottom of the window.

The second method to create a hyperlink is to use the hyperlink shortcuts in the status area at the bottom of the Freeway window. As with the Hyperlink dialogue box, these shortcuts list all the pages in the Freeway document, and all the anchors available on any selected page. To create a hyperlink using these shortcuts, the user selects the text or item to be hyperlinked, then selects the page from the hyperlink shortcut. To add an anchor to the hyperlink, the user selects the anchor from the context-sensitive anchor shortcut to the immediate right of the page list. If no anchors are available on the selected page, the anchor shortcut is not available. Completed hyperlinks are displayed in the status area beside the shortcuts. In addition to hyperlinks, the status area also displays the magnification of the document and the name of the current page, and provides shortcuts to change the magnification and to navigate to another page in the Freeway document.

User-defined tables are another powerful asset to Freeway 2.0. This new feature gives Freeway users the ability to better control how their pages are rendered when exported to HTML. In Freeway, tables work like independent objects, and can be placed and moved anywhere on the page, and each page can have multiple tables. Tables, however, cannot be inserted into a text box, bleed off the page, be covered by other objects, or be nested into another table. As with any other web design package, users can specify cell spacing, cell padding, border width, column width, row height, cell alignment, table background color, cell background color, table width, and table height, using the table and table cell tabs in the Inspector Palette. Users can also join and split cells at will, and format text across cells, columns and rows. Like Dreamweaver, Freeway also offers the ability to automatically populate a table using comma, tab or space delimited tabular data, a useful feature when publishing a static database.

Tables are often used to organize form and page elements as well as tabular data. Freeway's form elements are standard, and include checkboxes, radio buttons, buttons, text fields, pop-up menus, selection lists, and text areas. Each form element is treated as an individual item by Freeway, so each element, when selected, activates a tab in the Inspector Palette with which users set the element's name, values, text and other attributes as necessary. As with other web design packages, forms must be setup in two steps. The first step is to layout the form as desired. Only one form per page. Freeway 2.0 does not yet support multiple forms on a single page. The second step is to set the method and action to be taken when the form is submitted, and to add required hidden fields in the Form Setup dialogue box. Using Freeway's form elements, Matt Wright's FormMail, a popular but powerful email CGI script, can be set up effortlessly. Tables help keep form elements in vertical and horizontal alignment across browsers.

As noted earlier, Freeway allows users to specify whether text will be exported as HTML text or as a GIF. This is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg as far as Freeway is concerned. Freeway offers powerful text capabilities unavailable in any other web design package, capabilities once only available in desktop publishing applications such as PageMaker and QuarkXPress. Text boxes in Freeway can be linked and unlinked like those in QuarkXPress. Text boxes that are too small to show all text in them display a small overflow icon in the lower right hand corner, like Quark. This is handy to place text into columns, as in an article or review. Once published, however, text boxes with flowed text do not reflow. HTML does not permit this. Whatever text is contained in the boxes at the time the site is published remain in the boxes, much like the cells in a table.

One particularly nice feature is that text files can be added to a Freeway document simply by dragging and dropping from the Finder. Of course, text can also be imported, pasted or typed directly into Freeway as well. Hyphenation (available only to graphic text) can be controlled through the default style in Preferences. Freeway also offers character and paragraph styles which mimic Quark's character and paragraph styles. As a style is changed, the change is applied across the entire Freeway document, just as it is across a Quark document. Freeway's Style Palette provides instantaneous information about the Styles in the document. Paragraph styles are preceded by a paragraph symbol. Character styles have no symbol. Temporary styles are numbered. Users can elect to have both permanent and temporary styles displayed, or permanent styles only with the pop-up palette menu.

Changes to styles are made through the Style dialogue box. HTML text styles are simple, and relate only to HTML tags, offering attributes for font set, color, style, size, horizontal alignment, HTML list and HTML indent. Font Sets are a feature of standard HTML 3.2 and tell a user's browser to display text in the fonts specified in the set, trying the first font in the list, then the second, and so on until a font in the set is found on the user's computer. If none of the fonts are available on the user's computer, the default font -- usually Times -- will be used. Freeway provides four default font sets out of the box: Times, Courier, Helvetica and Symbol, four fonts installed with the MacOS and other operating systems. In these four default font sets, Softpress has specified alternative names for fonts typically installed by Microsoft products, including Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer, on Macs as well as PCs. Of course, users can customize these font sets or create their own using the Font Set dialogue box. Other typography formats, such as justified text, leading, case, shift, letter spacing, word spacing, background, space before and space after, are available to HTML text when the option to View CSS Attributes is enabled in the lower left corner of the Styles dialogue box.

GIF text styles, however, offer many other options for type, including width, height, baseline shift, slant, character spacing, leading, first indent, left indent, right indent, space before, space after, hyphenation, and word and letter spacing. These effects are previewed in Freeway and the type rendered as GIF images when the site is published. As noted previously, this can be an important time-saving feature. Users don't need to keep flipping back and forth between Freeway and an image editor to create graphic text.

In addition to the text features above, Freeway also offers two special text effects that web designers may find useful: Knockout Text and Foreground Color. Knockout Text produces transparent text when the text box has a fill so that whatever is behind the text box can be seen through the text. Here my son's picture is placed behind Knockout Text. To set text to knockout, the user simply selects the text and colors it with Knockout from the color palette. Foreground Color, on the other hand, allows text set behind a box to take on the color of the foreground color of the box on top of it so that the text below can be seen through the box on top. Where the upper box stops, the text in the lower box is its normal color. Here another photo of my son and his name are displayed using Foreground Color. His name is set in the lower box, his photo in the upper box. The foreground color of the upper box is set to blue. The text below is set to green.

Freeway's resemblance to Quark would be awkward if it didn't provide exemplary graphic capabilities. Fortunately, Freeway is right on target. It provides graphic capabilities far beyond those of Dreamweaver, GoLive or any other web design software. As noted earlier, Freeway can import GIF, JPEG, TIFF, PICT, PNG, EPS or BMP images. Images are placed imported into boxes in Freeway, just like images in Quark. Like Quark, Freeway provides three tools to create graphic boxes: a rectangle tool, an oval tool, and a pen tool to create polygons and bezier curves. These tools behave much like their Quark counterparts, and images can be moved inside their boxes for precise positioning. The pen tool is especially useful to create interesting shapes into which photos, other images, and even text can be imported. Boxes created with the pen tool are graphic items and are exported as graphics in GIF, JPEG or PNG format, as preferred by the user. Text is also exported as a graphic when inserted into a box created with the pen tool. Like Quark's boxes, any Freeway box can be edited using the pen tool. Users can add points, remove points, change bezier curves, and insert bezier curves at any point along the path. Freeway boxes can also be rotated, skewed, reflected, scaled, aligned, stacked, and distributed. Quark shortcuts for graphic boxes are also available in Freeway. Like text, image files can be dragged from the finder and dropped into boxes in Freeway.

Freeway offers complete control over compression and appearance of graphic items that will be exported. With Graphics Preview enabled from the View pull-down menu, Freeway displays graphic items, including graphic text, as they will appear when exported. Using the export tab in the Inspector Palette, users can select whether to export the graphic as a GIF, JPEG or PNG. As changes are made in the graphics tab, the preview is immediately updated and the new file size for the image is shown at the top of the tab in kilobytes. When GIF (SCREENSHOT) is chosen, users control the number of colors and color palette, whether adaptive, Mac 256 or Web 216; decide whether the image is dithered, interlaced and anti-aliased; and set an alt tag for the image. When JPEG is chosen, users control image quality, decide whether the image is progressive and anti-aliased, and set an alt tag for the image. When PNG is chosen, users select the color palette and number of colors, decide whether the image will be dithered, interlaced and anti-aliased, and specify an alt tag for the image. Freeway's use of graphics is intelligent. In addition to the powerful and productive graphics features above, Freeway also checks every image so that only a single copy of duplicate images is generated and referenced when the site is published to provide not only a smaller total site size, but also faster browsing for users.

One feature found in the graphics tab is the option to Combine Graphics. When enabled, this option creates a single image of the overlapping images when the web site is exported, using the settings for the underlying image. When disabled, the underlying graphic is cut up and output as separate parts assembled in an invisible table that, when viewed in a browser, appear to be a single image.

Some images may not need to be processed and exported by Freeway. If an image has already been compressed in an image editor, such as Photoshop, PhotoPaint or Canvas, and exported to GIF, JPEG or PNG, there may not be any reason for Freeway to process it. In such cases, images can be specified as pass-through graphics, which are exported through Freeway without alteration. Animated GIFs are only one example of images commonly set to pass-through Freeway. As a pass-through graphic, animated GIFs are untouched, and will play properly in the user's browser. However, if animated GIFs are processed by Freeway, the results are less than desirable. Transparency, restore to background, and other features may be removed. Previously compressed GIFs, JPEGs and PNGs are also candidates for pass-through, but they can just as easily be re-processed by Freeway for better results in many cases. In fact, sites that I have created with Freeway are commonly 97% efficient compared to 84% for sites created with Photoshop/GoLive, without any extra effort in Freeway. The Photoshop/GoLive combo, however, required several graphic remakes to achieve 84% efficiency. Users may check the efficiency of their sites, as I did, using GIF Wizard.

As with GoLive and Dreamweaver, dynamic content and custom HTML can be inserted into Freeway documents. Naturally, adding such content requires knowledge of HTML, JavaScript or other programming language, and the structure of an HTML page to successfully make the necessary additions. There are five means to add extra code to Freeway's pages: 1) the HTML Markup dialogue box to add code to a page; 2) extended code for specific objects; 3) reference external URL content when the page is viewed; 4) import external HTML into a document; and 5) insert code at a specific point on the page. Some sample sites use custom HTML and more to create shopping carts and other dynamic features.

The HTML Markup dialogue box allows users to insert custom code into sections of the selected page. Users can insert code before and after the <HTML>, <HEAD>, </HEAD>, <BODY>, </BODY> and </HTML> tags. Code can be added for only one of these tags, or all of these tags, on each page. Common JavaScript is usually added before the </HEAD> tag. The Extended command on the Page pull-down menu inserts name/value pairs inside the <BODY> tag for the page. The Extended command in the Hyperlink dialogue box adds the name/value pair inside the <A HREF> tag. A hyperlink must be set for this code to be published. The Extended command in the Item pull-down menu inserts name/value pairs into the appropriate <IMG> or <EMBED> tag. The name/value pairs are placed on either side of an equals sign, and the value content will be enclosed inside double quotes when the site is published.

To reference external URL content, the graphic/export tab in the Inspector Palette is used with an empty Freeway box. In the export tab, users set the export type to URL, select the appropriate content, either Image or HTML, and type or paste the URL into the URL text field. If Image is selected, an <IMG SRC="(user's URL)" BORDER=0> tag is inserted into the Freeway output. If HTML is selected, an <!-- #include virtual="(user's URL)" --> is inserted into the page. When this page is exported, a "blank" space is left for the content. In the case of the <include>, it cannot be previewed locally because the command is intended for a web server, which would interpret it and supply the necessary content.

Similar to external URL content, importing HTML content also uses an empty Freeway box. With the box selected, the user selects FILE:IMPORT and chooses a file with either .htm, .html, .asp or .inc extension. A text file icon will appear in the box with reference to the location of the imported file. Softpress recommends that files imported in this manner contain only the necessary HTML and nothing more. Additional HTML tags and elements may cause unpredictable results when the page is loaded in a browser. HTML content can be useful for adding simple headers and footers to web sites. Such uses don't require JavaScript!

The last means to add custom HTML and content is to add it at specific points in a page. To do this, users insert Markup Items. Markup Items can be inserted independently or inline with a run of HTML text. To create a Markup Item, users select INSERT:MARKUP ITEM. The Markup dialogue box appears. The Markup text is inserted into the text area, and is published with the page as-is. Freeway does not alter it. For this reason, Markup text must be valid HTML or results may be undesirable.

To this point, all has been written in reference to Freeway's HTML 3.2 + CSS layout preference. This layout preference provides CSS features for text over basic HTML 3.2 layout. HTML 3.2 and HTML 3.2 + CSS layout preferences are compatible with most browsers in use today. But Freeway 2.0 also offers new layout flexibility using HTML 4.0, which includes the use of layers. Older browsers do not support HTML 4.0, so users may opt to export their sites from Freeway using HTML 3.2 + CSS for compatibility. However, for designers needing HTML 4.0 features, compatible with only Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 or greater and Netscape Navigator 4.0 or greater, Freeway's happy to oblige.

Layers provide several benefits for web designers. Layer items float above HTML output, and their position can be specified so that they are placed in browsers with perfect precision. They can also overlap one another without having to be sliced, combined, or other items reflowed. Layers also add tremendous opportunity to introduce animation and interactivity using Dynamic HTML (DHTML), in which their behavior can be scripted using JavaScript. In many cases, layers provide better design techniques and opportunities than standard HTML tables to place text and objects. Freeway uses the <DIV> tag and absolute position to export layer items, rather than Navigator's proprietary <LAYER> tag, for best compatibility.

Before users can define items as layer items, they will need to set the page HTML level to 4.0 in either the Document Setup dialogue box, or in the Page tab of the Inspector Palette. Once the HTML level has been set to 4.0, any item on the Freeway page can be defined as a layer item. Layer items are created by simply clicking the Layers checkbox in the Tools Palette and then using any of the tools to create an object, or by selecting an object and enabling the Layer checkbox in the export tab of the Inspector Palette. Once layer items have been defined, they can be referenced using JavaScripts, DHTML and actions to create rollover and drop-down menu effects.

Despite Freeway 2.0's powerful new features, Softpress still faces challenges for improvement. One challenge is to integrate external file management into site management. For example, a user may have set up FormMail to email the contents of a from setup in Freeway. However, Freeway doesn't list this file in the Site Palette and doesn't copy them over to the output folder when the site is published. Though Freeway's built-in FTP capabilities, like any other FTP utility, can upload these files along with the Freeway site to the web server, managing these files is a necessity today. GoLive and Dreamweaver both provide external file management.

Freeway's new feature to import HTML also needs some work. For simple pages, with little more than text, this feature worked well. For a page with nested tables, the body copy disappeared when imported into Freeway; reasonable results since Freeway does not support nested tables. When importing another page, without nested tables, the content appeared to import without difficulty, but when previewed in a browser, the primary graphic at the top of the page and the JavaScript footer was removed. Softpress is aware of the limited functionality of the new feature to import HTML, and acknowledges so in the two-page chapter about the feature in the manual, noting that "this is a conversion process that is unlikely to result in an exact replica of the original site. [Users] should expect to have to do further editing and fine-tuning work after importing [their] HTML pages."

Freeway 2.0 also experiences considerable performance hits under several circumstances. One such circumstance is working with text-heavy sites with more than several pages. As the number of text-heavy pages increases, so does the performance hit. For example, Freeway takes 2:15 to open the file for this site and 1:15 to close it. In contrast, another file with only four pages, using HTML 4.0 and layers, opens in only 15 seconds. Freeway also slows down when pages with considerable body copy, such as the text of this article, or a lot of images, such as thumbnails, are loaded. These types of pages take about one minute to load when selected, with anti-aliasing for graphic text enabled and graphics preview disabled. Disabling anti-aliasing made little difference. With graphics preview enabled, however, the load time increased with the number of graphics on the page. As one might expect, the load time is significantly longer with graphics preview enabled for a page with 72 thumbnails. Giving more RAM to Freeway made no appreciable difference if any with these procedures.

Freeway users may also stumble across problems with fonts, such as this font anomaly which occurred on several pages across the inetreviews.com site I had been working on for some time. The only means I could find to resolve the problem was to avoid it by changing the text from a special font to be exported as graphic text to simply default HTML text. This worked like a charm. The problem has not recurred.

Other font issues may appear as well. When hyperlinking a passage of graphic text, which referenced a style used successfully in the same manner on dozens of other pages, the baseline of the hyperlinked text shifted down by several points. Even after deleting the text and resetting it, the problem occurred again. I recreated the page. The problem remained. Similar text behaved as expected on other pages. I could not be solve the problem. I worked around it by changing the way the site navigated, and did not use the style in question when I needed a hyperlink, since the hyperlink was clearly triggering the anomaly in this single instance.

Though I did not report the problems I experienced with Freeway to Softpress, Softpress is nevertheless responsive to bug reports. On more than one occasion, when Freeway mailing list members reported problems on the mailing list which could not be resolved, members of the Softpress technical support team, who are also active participants in the list, requested the Freeway document in question for study. Having the tech support team as members of the mailing list is an excellent policy.

The regular members of the Freeway list are also helpful. They provide advice, solutions, feedback and assistance with Freeway. They are respectful and friendly, and no question goes unanswered. They're perhaps the best group of people I've come across on a mailing list. No member has ever flamed or been disrespectful to another member. The greatest strength of any mailing list is the willingness of its members to share information and knowledge, but a unique strength of the Freeway mailing list is the lengths that members go to when helping other members. For example, several members are well versed writing Freeway actions. They seem to whip them out in their sleep. These members have cobbled together or altered existing actions for other members in only a few days. Specifically, Tim Plumb revised two existing actions so that I may take advantage of opening new windows of specified size to display screenshots from both graphic and text hyperlinks. Freeway's existing actions didn't provide these features. Without this assistance, I'd have given up on Freeway long ago, and this review would be much different. Freeway owes a debt of gratitude to the active members of the Freeway mailing list especially to those members like Tim who help make Freeway more useful, for the good of the Freeway community.

Members of the Freeway mailing list have enthusiastically provided the following URLs as examples of sites that have been built in Freeway. These sites demonstrate the power and flexibility of Freeway. I would personally like to thank Tim Plumb, James Butler, Ray Byrne, Paul Gilliard, Scott Gross, Keith Martin, Steve Sheldon, Chris Tucker, Oliver Bailey, and Joe Muscara, webmaster at Alsoft, for their assistance at various times as I wrote this review, and for providing the following URLS to showcase Freeway 2.0's powerful capabilities:

• Alsoft
• Apostrophobia
• Architype
• Checkmate Power Boats
• Class Cosmetics
• Diversity Now
• Felt Film
• Impresaria
• Internet Gift Store
• Lindsey Clark Brothers Landscaping
• MacValley User Group
• North Central Tech Prep Consortium
• Nouveau Creative Services
• Perfume Shopping
• Rochester School
• Scarbutts Printing
• Thames Valley Astronomy Center
• Triangle Fastener Corporation
• Two Rivers Films
• Walter Segal Self Build Charity
• Web Ted
• Wozair

But Softpress isn't content with the success of Freeway 2.0. Version 3.0 will be released shortly, and promises to be more powerful and productive than ever. Freeway 3.0 is slated to provide up to 10x better performance over 2.0 for opening and editing large documents; to include a built-in JavaScript interpreter which will facilitate the development of complex scripts; to extend Freeway's graphic capabilities to import native Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop files; to utilize Photoshop plugins to increase the number of graphic formats Freeway can import and export; to improve multimedia capabilities including the ability to preview QuickTime and Flash content; to feature a new link map which provides a complete overview of hyperlinks in a site; and to sport a new ability to validate external links.

All web designers should give Freeway a try. A fully-functional 30-day demo is available from the Softpress web site.

Freeway was reviewed using a 6500/300 (upgraded to Newer Technology's G3/300 card) with 128mb RAM, 36-64mb given to Freeway.

4/00

Mike Swope is publisher of inetreviews.com, a site that will shortly be launched and also the vice-president of MacWichita Macintosh User Group in Wichita, KS. He runs his own graphics design business, Swope Design, that provides professional and affordable graphic design, printing, and consultation services/training to businesses, organizations and individuals.