Just wondered if others have had a look at Flux and if so what do you think of it and is it worth investing in? I know that OT has.
I know that it is available through the Mac App store, but it appears that it is £10 more expensive there and cheaper if you purchase it directly from the Flux website.
I have looked at both RapidWeaver and Sandvox and don't particularly like them and was just wondering about Flux and perhaps Freeway.
Any views anyone?
Thanks
iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.7)
Good stuff. I'll have a look.
Thanks!
Roddy,
To be fair, some on this forum have no other option than to move to something like Sandvox, as they have no knowledge of html or css and are not prepared to learn either.
It is correct that I did open one of my iWeb created sites using the Flux 3 trial version just to see what it looked like with the div layout etc.
It would not however import all this, rather I would start again from scratch.
Rather than waste money on something like Sandvox I would have thought it would have been better to just carry on using iWeb until something better in the drag and drop style software comes along.
Frameworks like JQuery Mobile, iUI and JQuery touch hardly require any knowledge of HTML and the templates obviate the need for learning CSS. I would image its just a matter of time before someone comes up with a drag and drop interface for building this type of website.
I have downloaded the Flux 30 day trial and am about to give it a go.
I think the converstation about the downsides to "inline" is a red-herring. The documentation says the default is for styling to be inline and it is best to leave it this way when creating an element - but you next step should be to un-inline to push styling into a style sheet.
I can program in many languages, and agree that coding is best - but I know very little CSS and HTML. What appeals to me about Flux is that it looks like you can work with out having to be peering at CSS and HTML manuals every 10 seconds since everything is a "mouse click" away. Being able to position elements also seems perferable to counting pixels on a piece of paper.
If iWeb still came with iLife I probably would have just used that since it was free. But since I am going to have to pay a chunk of money I feel pulled towards buying a coding level tool rather than say Rapidweaver.
The advantage of putting the bulk of the styles in an external stylesheet is that the browser only has to download this once. Everytime you add an inline style, the browser has to work harder and the page takes more time to download.
This is one of the reasons that iWeb produces huge amounts of code for a relatively simple page. When you drag an item around the page it has to supply the browser with positioning data and dimensions for the element. Inline styles should only be used for an element that is unique to one page of a site if possible.
HTML is a lot simpler and more efficient now that CSS is so well developed. HTML tables are now considered bad practice and iframe styles should employ css rather than html where possible. HTML5 will encourage us to do all this!
I too have been spending the week learning Flux 3. I probably would have given up on it if it wasn't for the screencasts. The only reason I ditched iWeb was because of it's 'unfriendlyness' with search engines - even after using all of Rage's application to increase my chances.
What I am now concerned about is how Google etc view Flux websites? I am unable to find any comments on this. It uses Javascript and from what I've researched Java is not the greatest for SEO either.
Am I wasting my time with Flux?? Any comments would help. I'm limited with knowledge on coding/ccs.
Unless you use javascript to create your navagaiton links on all the pages it shouldn't be a a problem. But then many websites have javascript menus and they get along OK.
What I did for all of my iWeb website is add a blank page that was not included in the standard navbar that had a text based html navbar with all of the other pages linked to. I used this to create the Google docs for their search functions.
Just as iWeb, Flux publishes webpages.
Webpages.
Just that.
Webpages.
Write interesting content. With or without iWeb or Flux.
I have no problem being found and indexed by Google. Perhaps I do not consider it a right to be found, and Google has no obligation to find/index me.
Besides that, I have no desire to provide free labor to help Google's advertising business.
And note that JavaScript and Java are totally different things.
Flux?
