The idea behind Freeway is to offer a tool to design websites using an interface very similar to that of
Desktop publishing applications like
QuarkXPress or
Adobe InDesign, without the need to dig into the HTML and JavaScript code. More advanced website features, like connecting to a database, are managed through plug-ins called
"Actions". Many commonly used Actions are bundled with Freeway itself, like a suite of Actions that lets the user create a shopping cart through the Mals
e-commerce system. Freeway produces syntactically valid
HTML code and
Cascading Style Sheets,
Freeway Express Freeway Express appeared around the same time as version 3.5. It is a more entry level version of Freeway aimed at home users and priced accordingly compared to the
Pro version. Version 6 for Freeway Expres became the
freeware version of Freeway Pro.
Reception While presenting favourably to QuarkXPress users with a familiar user experience, -
Freeway 2.0 got mice (out of 5) from
Macworld in May 1999, citing the familiarity of use for
QuarkXPress users and the good support for CSS and JavaScript, while outlining the lack of access to the HTML output.
MacAddict in July 1999 additionally found its retail price too high. -
Freeway 3.0 got 3 mice (out of 5) from
Macworld in September 2000, outlining the improvements, but still citing the lack in HTML import, the lack of external style sheet, and the non-validating generated HTML markup. For Freeway 3.5.5,
MacAddict gave a 3 (out of 5)
solid rating in February 2003. -
Freeway 4 Pro got (out of 5) rating from
Macworld in February 2006, praising the "no HTML experience required" approach while noting the difficulty for an experienced web designer to adjust to it. -
Freeway 5 Pro got 4 (out of 5) with a
great rating from
MacLife in September 2008, praising its ease of use, standard compliant code and excellent documentation while being limited with HTML hand coding. == Discontinuation ==