Softpress Freeway Pro
Using Freeway Pro is like operating a crane: yes, you’re the one controlling the action, but it’s doing all the heavy lifting. From converting your dragged-and-dropped image files to web ready formats without making you write any code to developing Master Pages that cut down on your copy and paste time, Freeway Pro has been created for the professional designer with an aim of decreasing time making sure everything’s correct and increasing the ability to focus on—gasp—the actual look of your page.
With Freeway Pro you can open any media file from movies to pictures to Flash and sit back, relax, and watch the software do your coding. It doesn’t change the original image, either—just makes sure it’s displayed the way you mean for it to be. Layered transparent or translucent graphics are supported as well, either by importing them or directly creating them in the program and the 24 PNG output means you’ll get true transparency on the web as well.
Master Pages are another time saving feature included in this program: your logo, navigation and footer are saved as a template, effectively, and all you have to do is load your content. No more opening old files, renaming them, copy and pasting till your command keys are rubbed out…every time you open a new page, Freeway Pro makes sure your Master Page content is at your fingertips, dramatically reducing the time you spend on the nuts and bolts of design. Again, this feature allows you more time to be creative with the site instead of drudging along with busy work (no matter how essential that busy work is).
If you’ve ever needed to design a page with regard to multiple browsers and formats…and we bet you have…then Freeway Pro’s accessibility options will cut down on worry and make your life easier. These features allow you to view your site as text-only, without graphics and even without JavaScript to see how all levels of technology view your content. Even though this is strictly Mac-based software, it allows you the option of designing for a huge variety of browsers and operating systems.
Ease of use and intuitive operation make Freeway Pro an excellent choice for the developer who’d rather spend time on content than on coding. Of course, you could dig out that CSS reference book you’ve been using for the last who knows how long, but when this workhorse makes even CSS easy, why would you want to do a thing like that? Let this software do the work. Requires Tiger or higher.
Freeway Pro | Price: $249.99
Bare Bones BBEdit 9.2
What we enjoy even more than web design software that’s good at its job is web design software with a sense of humor. BBEdit 9.2 has both qualifications, along with a “metric truckload” of improvements to the previous version. Whether you’re creating a website or writing complex programs, BBEdit has the features and shortcuts to make your life easier, including completions for code as you edit, integration with MobileMe, and the ability to work in multiple source code languages.
File Handling features are much improved—even though BBEdit “doesn’t suck” in any incarnation, the user friendliness of these new additions has really elevated the software. You can open the same document in more than one window, and embedded editors are de rigueur in search and project windows as well as disk browsers. The Projects feature allows you to keep tabs on each of your endeavors, whether they’re code or chapters of the book you’ve been working on since college and you can even create folders in the program to group all your files by type regardless of where they are on your machine or on a remote network.
Programming features have gotten a boost as well: code folding especially improves the “readability” of your file and allows you to streamline the view of your source code. Codeless language modules work for you to add syntax coloring and function navigation as the name suggests…you don’t have to write code for that anymore! The Completion feature deserves more in depth discussion as well: you can tell BBEdit how to speed up completion behaviors on a per language basis. And the smart cookie offers you a complete list of options modeled after clipping, built in language data, and the system dictionary.
Finally, the search feature finds simple words or complex patterns of code across multiple documents without even opening them first! Big edits and corrections are quicker and easier than ever before with that option.
Created for professional web developers and software writers, the program definitely offers a lot more than your average Joe Six Pack needs, but wouldn’t you rather have the Lamborghini of web editing than the Honda? We thought so. Requires Mac OS X 10.4 or higher, but recommends 10.6 for optimal functionality.
BBEdit 9.2 | Price:$129.00, or $30.00 to upgrade
Medialab SiteGrinder 2 Professional
SiteGrinder 2 is different from most other web design programs in that it is a plug in for Photoshop, not a standalone piece of software. If you love Photoshop so much you almost never close it, this is a great way to add yet another layer of functionality to a program that you already know all the tricks for.
First of all, the Pages pane is an innovation. Using the Layers Comp feature to create your template, you can effectively design a multi-page website in a matter of minutes by setting your background, titles, and centering and telling Photoshop which layers to make visible on each page. Setting these default page settings means you only do the layout once, and each page thereafter is a click away from displaying only what you want and need as far as the look of your page.
SiteGrinder is still a Photoshop plug-in, though, and as such has a variety of options for image sharing. The Automated Gallery Building feature is a boon for photographers, artists, and anyone who wants to organize their images in a clear, easy to navigate way. And like every other feature in this easy to use and intuitive program, all you need to do is define the size and shape of your thumbnails and the main viewing area and tell SiteGrinder where to find the images. Then you can watch with pride as the images are located, loaded and thumbnails are created automatically. If you feel the need to be more involved with the process, you can create captions, paginate the images and create a PayPal button to let the new audience you’ve reached purchase your art directly. Pretty cool, right?
In the same vein, Flash becomes much less of a pain—in fact, you don’t even need to know the interface or ever deal with picky XML format. Just tell the plug-in where to find the images, choose your transitions and watch as your slideshow is created before your eyes and enjoy the built in ease of use.
Created for maximum ease and minimum effort, SiteGrinder nonetheless knows that sometimes you need to be knee deep in you-know-what to feel like you’re really creating. That’s where it’s Settings panel comes in; it lets you create JavaScript, customize delay times on your pop ups, set up FTP access, and basically do everything you’d ever want to do in a full service web design program. Just because SiteGrinder tries to lighten your load doesn’t mean it doesn’t know when to step back and let you do the dirty work.
SiteGrinder | Price: $349.00
Ambrosia Snapz Pro X
And what would a good website be without a ton of QuickTime?
A “digital video camera” for your screen, Snapz Pro X promises quick and easy digital capture in the QuickTime format for a range of projects from product demos to training videos to archiving streaming video. Version 2 has had a lot of love put into it in terms of upgrades and makes it easier than ever to say bye-bye to static screen shots—why bother with them when getting video is this simple?
Snapz Pro X’s upgrade functions a lot like Snow Leopard did: it didn’t completely overhaul the previous version. Instead, it streamlined and pared down features and added new functionality to an already successful platform. The main interface is so simple it’s scary—you have fewer than ten options for what you can do with this program, but there’s freedom in the simplicity as well. You know going in exactly what this program is capable of and that it is set up to deliver. One of the few places with a tremendous amount of options is the save as feature; you can choose from eight supported formats and exert exacting control over the image compression. Editing your screenshots gives you a few extraneous choices as well, and you can crop, scale and dither the images as well as add borders, create thumbnails, even overlay watermarks and copyright notices. Wouldn’t want anyone trying to steal your company training secrets, now would we?
Snapz Pro X requires OS X 10.4 but like many other programs we’ve seen lately has already made the switch to 64-bit to be compatible with Snow Leopard. All in all this program is easy to use, quick to learn and produces a great product, being as it’s a full twenty times faster than any other video capture software currently on the market.
Snapz Pro X | Price: $69.00
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