Flux?

£ 16,99 = € 20,30 when you buy it in their webstore

€ 89,99 when you buy it in the Mac App store.

Note that all these applications, just like iWeb, have one thing in common.

They all allow the users to create crap websites.

I use PageSpinner, and it shows :

http://www.optima-system.com/pagespinner/

It too has a live preview when you type the code.

£ 16,99 = € 20,30 when you buy it in their webstore

Are you referring to Flux? The only price I get at their site is £69.99. At the US App Store it's about £73.

Happy Holidays

I bought it a couple of weeks ago. I was on the verge of buying it thru their site when there was a brief MacBundle offer of Flux and 3 other apps for $25. I've never been that lucky in my timing beforel

I like it. I know a modicum of HTML so using it wasn't a too difficult transition. I viewed the video tutorials many times to find out how to make buttons, etc. Download them if you can as it's easier to view locally. The videos are good but at times they use the method of dimming the entire screen except around the cursor and it makes it difficult to see where they clicked in the Flux window.

I've still trying to get a better handle on the <div> element and how it's used. I found that you can do essentially the same in Flux as you can with HTML snippets in iWeb. I'm converting my HelperSite to Flux and have converted my Demo pages Contents page to Flux. Still learning CSS and all it can do which is a lot.

They have a 30 day demo which you can try. Be ready to give as much attention during that time so you have a good idea if you want to purchase it at the end of the demo as there is a learning curve. But 30 days should be enough.

Flux 3 is unusual in that it is capable of code entry - with all the advantages - and also allows you drag stuff around the page. It does have a fairly steep learning curve. Its certainly a far better application than Freeway which is kind of antiquated with a sluggish performance and a really poor UI.

Flux is capable of creating responsive web designs which are becoming a neccessity nowadays. It does tend to encourage the use of inline styles which makes for poor performance and, when the drag and drop positioning is employed, all that positioning info gets added to the code so you can end up with bloated code like all the other drag and drop style editors.

On the other hand, you can start from a stylesheet and produce much more efficient code with the option to add a few random objects with custom positioning without having to figure out the actual co-orinates.

The main advantage that I would see to using this app is that it would allow you to continue with traditional web designs using drag and drop while getting to grips with responsive designs and those using frameworks.

Internet access by mobile devices is approaching that of personal computers and a traditional website is rapidly becoming redundant as a marketing and information tool.

With your previous html and css knowledge I'll be asking you for help with Flux in a short time. They have two forums, one run buy Flux and the other on the Google forums.

All topics for The Escapers

Discussions - Flux Users | Google Groups

Roddy wrote:

Flux 3 is unusual in that it is capable of code entry - with all the advantages - and also allows you drag stuff around the page. It does have a fairly steep learning curve. Its certainly a far better application than Freeway which is kind of antiquated with a sluggish performance and a really poor UI.

I wonder if I could get you, or others, to do me a favor:

I, too, have looked at several alternatives, and didn't much like any of them. I was rather mystified by Flux, but it was the only one that looked like it might work for me if I could figure out how to use it.

Here's my problem -- I've got a 140+ page iWeb site. I've moved it to GoDaddy, but iWeb's quirks seem to be getting worse and worse. There isn't any fancy stuff, but I do use a lot of colored text boxes, many of which have text wrapped around images, sometimes multiple ones (iWeb doesn't always do them right, and that seems to be a bigger problem for many of the other apps).

I make frequent small changes and additions. I'm not terribly concerned about sluggish performance, but want to be able to make revisions quickly, with a minimum of fuss -- that's the attraction of iWeb to me.

Could you or Old Toad or someone familiar with Flux (or the others) take a quick look, and let me know if you think Flux or any other app would work for me?

Here's a fairly representative sample page: http://pondini.org/TM/17.html

Thanks very much for any opinions.

Ethmoid wrote:

. . .

Flux does have an import facility so you will be able to open a previous project and I did this with one of my iWeb built websites yesterday

Ah, I missed that when I looked at Flux last summer. That should help.

I would say that you could most definitely re-create your site using Flux and you can create colour filled text boxed too in Flux.

Multiple ones in the body of the same page? That's what I couldn't figure out how to do with several of the others.

Download the 30 day trial version and have a play around.

I did that last summer, and found it pretty much mystifying (I know very little about HTML, and zero about CSS).

But I'll give it another try.

Thanks very much for the advice.

With your style of website I would think you are making life complicated by using Flux.

You have a basic single column layout which would require a fairly simple main style sheet and the HTML would take care of the main layout.

The "colored blocks" would position themselves and can be given an inline style to specify the background color, border style etc.

In less time than it would take to learn Flux you could create the same design from a basic stylesheet and an HTML boilerplate. There are probably hundreds of examples of these available.

Roddy wrote:

. . .

The "colored blocks" would position themselves and can be given an inline style to specify the background color, border style etc.

Would that include wrapping around multiple images? I know you can use multiple text boxes instead, with one box per image (and I've had to do that in some cases with iWeb), but it's a PITA, especially when you want to add a few words.

In less time than it would take to learn Flux you could create the same design from a basic stylesheet and an HTML boilerplate. There are probably hundreds of examples of these available.

Since I know very little about HTML, and zip about CSS, that sounds a bit daunting. Would you be so kind as to point me to some of those examples, or tell me what to search for?

Thanks very much.

Wrapping text around images takes care of itself since the images are set to float either left or right in the stylesheet and given a suitable margin and padding. When you want to insert an image into a div you would add an image tag like this...

<img class="floatimgleft" src="url to the image file" alt="alternative title" height="300" width="450" />

... and the text will flow around it to the right.

If you need to break the text and have the image between it and the next paragraph, you place it in a div which is center aligned...

<div align="center">

<img src="url to the image file" alt="alternative title" height="300" width="450" />

</div>

It doesn't get much simpler than that and the HTML file is a lot faster loading because you don't have all that posotioning data the apps like iWeb need to add just to allow you to drag and drop.

This site has examples of basic html and its corresponding stylesheet. This page shows a basic single column layout...

http://www.maxdesign.com.au/articles/css-layouts/one-fixed/

The main reason that I decided to use a code entry style editor and against using Flux is that web design is changing towards mobile designs which need to be very efficiently coded. Apps like iWeb can't do this. With Flux you can but not if you use its drag and drop features and fall for its ability to add all these inline styles!

When you move on to designs using frameworks - which appear to be the way of the future - all the code for several pages is in one html doc. Imagine what its like trying to find anything in these docs if you are adding all the inline styline and positioning info!

Those who talk about switching to RapidWeaver, Sandvox, Freeway etc or importing iWeb built sites into code entry style software have got their heads stuck in the sand and are going to wake up one day and find that hardly anybody is visiting their dinosaur website.

Hopefully, some day soon, an application will appear that makes it easy to create websites using the new javascript frameworks but, until then, you either get left behind or have to get your brain cells around some code. You can produce good basic websites with very little knowledge of code and they will be far more efficient than anything a template based editor can achieve.

I did consider using Flux but decided that it was easier to learn how HTML and CSS fit together than get to grips with the way Flux works. On the other hand, Old Toad finds he gets on way better with Flux. Others may not find either suitable but they won't know that until they try.

Here's an example of a mobile website design adapted to appear OK on computers...

http://www.ezmacwebdesign.com/jquery-mobile-test/index.html

If you had told me a few months ago that I could built a site like this I would have written you off as being as insane as me!