[Angus_D]

Softpress Releases Preview of Freeway 4 Pro

Today Softpress released a Preview version of Freeway 4 Pro, the flagship for the next generation of Softpress' no-need-to-code website development products. Freeway 4 Pro continues the tradition of offering professionals the best possible design environment coupled with the most powerful tools for the creation and assembly of Web content.

Among the host of new features:

• extended CSS layout capability—with support for absolute, relative and fixed positioning, and fully hierarchical page layouts,
• standards compliant XHTML output—both Strict and Transitional,
• Unicode support for multi-lingual sites,
• improved transparency/opacity handling,
• a wide range of new built-in graphical and type effects,
• and support for Apple's Spotlight technology.

“With Freeway 4 Pro, designers can finally create fully standards-compliant sites employing advanced CSS layouts,” commented Richard Logan, Softpress' Managing Director. “They can even mix diverse character sets on the same page, and there's still no need to write any code.”

AVAILABILITY

Freeway 4 Pro Preview is a fully functional trial expiring on the 16th of October, 2005 and is available as a free download today from the Softpress web site at http://www.softpress.com

Freeway 4 Pro will be available at the end of September for the competitive price of $279 ($249 download). Further information on sales and upgrades is available at http://www.softpress.com/F4prices

ABOUT FREEWAY

Freeway, famous for its ease-of-use and clean efficient code generation, is the tool of choice for professionals and amateur Mac users who prefer to focus on design, not code!

ABOUT SOFTPRESS

Softpress was founded in 1993 to address the emerging needs of professional publishers and designers for new media authoring tools. Its head office is in Oxford, England.

[Krypton]

But did you code it in Cocoa Finlay?

[Macanoid]

stunning new interface and options, can't wait for the real thing!! Currently not very stable but I expect that to be fixed when it's released. Thanks.

btw - will FW4 work with the current actions and fast packs??

[Angus_D]

Originally Posted by Macanoid

btw - will FW4 work with the current actions and fast packs??

Yes - although not all actions will necessarily work with the new output options. Freeway 4 will ship with the Graphics and Graphics Extra FAST packs built in.

[Macanoid]

Thanks - excellent news. Been playing with the preview last night and I have to say the new interface feels really good, it now feels like a proper OSX application.

+ Great new interface
+ love the new features
+ like how new sites are saved in some sort of project folder

- currently rather buggy
- importing old sites doesn't work very well

all in all, very very impressive. Btw, will you support Core Image?

[Angus_D]

Originally Posted by Macanoid

- currently rather buggy
- importing old sites doesn't work very well

Hence "Preview".

Btw, will you support Core Image?

What you see in the Preview is essentially the feature set of Freeway 4 Pro. We're not going to be supporting Core Image for this release - for one thing it's a Tiger-only feature, and we can't tie ourselves to Tiger just yet.

[Macanoid]

thanks for the quick reply. Sorry to hear Core Image isn't supported just yet, but understandable you don't want to tie yourselves to Tiger just yet (although a Tiger & FW$ package does make an appealing promo-deal )

Btw, I fully understand it's a preview version so the bugginess doesn't bother me. I'm just glad FW4pr is out. I think you've done an outstanding job already. Thanks again!

[sandsl]

Well its certainly come a long way since the quark-like versions.

Still, parts of the interface seems somewhat antiquated specifically; some of the icons, and a layout engine with zooming rectangles and non-antialiased text & graphics. Freeways UI seems to be a little behind the curve from the outset. I also feel softpress have missed (so far, in the preview) a golden opportunity to provide a set of quality design templates, such as those provided in Keynote for presentations.

In my opinion, a rather balding OS9 app, has been given a (three quarter hearted) OSX make-over, and misses the mark of being having truly quality OSX UI (think OmniGraffle).

Whilst the user experience remains lacklustre, one can't deny that it is a decent HTML generator and probably the best in its class. Thumbs up for the spotlight plugin too!

[Macanoid]

I was wondering, is there a reason why you didn't built in a crash-reporter option? I can imagine you being interested in user-feedback. Keep up the good work though!