Flux 2 - first screengrab

[paulbradforth]

If you highlight the CSS file in the Site Manager, then hit Apple-J or right-click, you can open it in the editor of your choice.

[ChildGod]

Hi,

I am considering Flux, but while it strikes me as a great program it appears a beast to learn. I would like to make a few suggestions after first asking that I be allowed to participate in the Beta testing. This would greatly assist me as I am in the process of familiarizing myself with Flux. Yet, at the same time, I do not wish to learn something that is in the throws of being transformed. Thanks much for your consideration in this matter. These suggestions aren't new perhaps, but I believe that the best way to recognize a needed feature is having it requested a thousand times.

1. You really need a much stronger web presence as well as the kind of documentation that developers and coders are used to. I currently use Rapid Weaver as my primary development platform as CS3 which I use on occasion just tends to be overkill for some of the projects I been requested to do of late. Yet, the greatest strength of RW I think is its community and its ability to be extended by said community. Yet, this is also its greatest weakness to me. Plugins and themes don't always work together so while you can purchase a plugin for a particular functionality, its not always available to you if the sum of features and/or the theme for a particular site are incompatible. Depending on what you want to do, you really have to plan out your site before you start really because once you commit to a plugin regardless of its source, you often find you committed to that plugin's limitations as well, which can be vexing. Simply if the page type that you selected as your base or the template doesn't accommodate additional functionality you decide to add later you're looking at some hopefully short term grief. I love RapidWeaver but don't like the byzantine game of being locked into one plugin hoping that it will work with the other plugins I need it to. This is why I have such high hopes for Flux.

2. Conversely, RapidWeavers saving grace is its templates and the community that makes them. What I would like to see from Flux if you agree to it of course is a template builder and manager that allows Flux users to drop something on/in and as the program acknowledges receipt, it allows you to reserve it for a particular use say background/header/footer image and so forth. Check a few boxes and you can use it in any present or future Flux sites. The other thing that the manager would do is allow Flux users to drop Template Monster, Pixellogo, or Wordpress themes in and have them completely ingested and translated into full usability. I am a programmer and sometimes a really lazy one. As such I down right resent it when Dreamweaver and now Rapidweaver which was supposed to save me from the pitfalls of DW, force me to go scurrying out on the web so I can AJAX/JAVA/LIGHTBOX my own damn way out of some fix or other. This happens to me primarily because while I am a master (my own words really) at photoshop, I seem to gravitate towards other people's templates that I would modify to my own taste thus spending far less of my own time. Modifying themes for use can really give one a lot of resentments believe me and I really think this suggestion would go a long way to solving this problem. I think the web 2.0 thing has made some of us lazy and lets be honest, some of us are great coders but left to our own devices will come up with some ugly websites. The world really doesn't need another template format. It just needs a really great piece of tech that can use everything that is out there. Imagine being able to say Flux has 50 Flux themes or Flux can use any of the hundreds of themes that you've seen other people using that you couldn't use with your former environment. The other reason I make this suggestion is after having used RW themes for some time, I see some themes that I really love but the included widths don't suit a project or what they will or will not let me alter is really a deal breaker. Sometimes the theme is great, but guess what there is no blue selection or just not the right shade. It can get that insane. Whatever you do to satisfy Flux's need for templates, modularity and granularity is imperative in that it would allow purchasers not to be stuck with only the sizes or changes in color that the designer felt. I should be able to purchase a Flux template and the put it into my Flux Temp Manager and extend it however I want. Every aspect of a themes should be tagged so that it can be changed in concert or individually. I wouldn't mind buying a separate piece of software that will take any template and spit it out for Flux or hell any of the over environments.

Just my few pennies. Whatever you decide thanks for Flux though I am really just finding that I am going to have to get back into coding websites and set Flux as a great start intermediary.

[Blond]

To ask about beta testing email "theescapers.com us@" (hopefully that will confuse the spam bots).

Be aware that a few people tested the first beta of version 2 and we are all waiting patiently for the next version, this could be a few weeks. The Escapers are working like men possessed at the moment to address the first round of comments, see Flux 2 Beta. Also these are very early betas so do not expect everything to just work.

Flux uses a very simple concept to visually lay out a page letting you concentrate on the visual aesthetics rather than the code, in my mind this is how it should be done. If you read the flux manual anybody can quickly get started but the world of web is sometimes more akin to voodoo and black magic. Flux 2 is addressing much of this but there will always be things that are difficult to understand.

Fardilha has added some great tutorials to the forum which are extremely well presented and will help build a bigger and better manual in the future. Have a look and see if this is the sort of thing you would expect to have in the manual, if you like what you find leave a comment. They are all for version 1 at the moment.

Flux 2 is great at reading sites. I have made some sites with iWeb and then opened them with Flux 2. This is an easy way for the novice to get to grips with Flux and compare the two approaches, see what you think. If you could test some Rapid Weaver sites and report back it would be helpful. You can select a site in the Site Manager and do a save as but as yet there is no save page as template. Flux 2 should be able to display all your favourite sites/templates then let you play with them.

[tdu]

You approach Flux from a totally different way than any other web design apps for Mac so far. Until you get your head around that, it's tough to learn.

Flux made me realize what you can do laying out a site using DIVS. What I ended up doing was going to a program which I already knew how to use, GoLive, and figure out how to work in only CSS in that program and doing layouts with DIVS. I then came back to Flux, and Now do I not only "get it", and I find learning things in the program much more intuitive.

The point being, you can't compare Flux to an application like RapidWeaver. Or any other Mac web design application for that matter. It falls somewhere between all of them. I think you really have to get pretty grounded in CSS to be able to use the program properly.

Regarding the plug-ins I think a key difference is Flux is using existing libraries. The plug-ins aren't Flux specific like the Rapid Weaver ones are RW specific. But there needs to be some good documentation.

Fardilha's tutorials are excellent. THAT is stuff that there is no way I could figure out on my own without a lot of work. I really hope the manual uses samples like those.

[Fardilha]

Heh!

You ppl will end up making me blush.
I stopped making those tutorials simply because Flux interface is going to change so much and they are supposed to be a "step by step" type of approach.
(And because I still have hopes that the Inspector changes a little more to "kill" those sub-menus )

As soon as it gets stable again, I'll gladly make a few new ones.
I've been using MooTools more and more and man, does it rock!!
From converting a simple HTML table to a sortable one on the fly to completely re-style the look of a form items (radio buttons, pop-up menus...) to change the page elevators, there's a bunch of little things that you can do with MooTools that will make your page look wayyyyy different of the others.
And if you add just a few lines of PHP and MySQL code in the middle you can do cool mini-apps.

Well, but I'm way off-topic.
tdu is right, Flux let's you approach coding (and designing) on a much more visual way.
As long as you learn the initial "way of think" of Flux, you will see that it's closer to the way that normally we tend to think when creating a page.
Because if this, Flux is not "getting on the way" when I'm working, but instead is actually making me work better.
(I did stop working with it since I've been fine-tuning by hand a php site of mine, but I can't wait to start a new project to play with Flux again... maybe by then I'll do a new tutorial )

Take care all.
Fardilha

Fardilha

[talkinghead]

Waiting for Flux 2 to be release… When and for what price, please?

[travisnj]

I am requesting BETA download as well.

Thank you.

[Blond]

If you buy Flux 1 now, you get a free upgrade to Flux 2, and Flux 2 will almost certainly be more expensive that Flux 1, so if you like the way Flux 2 is heading, it's cheaper to buy now.
MT

IMO Flux 1 cost was set at a very competitive price and you have to be barking mad not to buy a copy and get a free upgrade to Flux 2.
Anybody still persisting with Flux 1 really should migrate to Flux 2 beta now.

If you email The Escapers they will give your user name for this forum access to the locked beta forum. There you will find a link to the latest download. There is no pressure to post but if you have questions or better still some ideas please post.

[talkinghead]

Yes, I have several questions.

First, let me say that I think that Flux is very interesting and I would like to use it intensively.

– But, if you change many things in Flux 2, I would like to know again when this version should be ready and what should be the price for it (1).
I want to study very deeply how Flux 2 would work, but, not being an expert, I shall not take the risk to use a version in beta if some important things are going to change in the process of building sites: I should learn Flux once (at least since Flux 3).

– Another concern is how to maintain sites with Flux in the future. I hope it (2).
– And other concerns should be about the help and how to guides, and the support, especially when some features are maybe not working with Internet Explorer. I would like to know if some features could be not display by IE 6, IE 7 or IE 8 (being on Mac I stick on Safari, Firefox, Opera and Camino, but most people are still using IE…) (3) (4).

Thanks in advance for your answers to my questions 1, 2, 3, 4.

[Blond]

£40 see here
http://www.theescapers.com/flux/index.html

The basic concept of how Flux works is not changing. The beta programme was to iron out bugs, improve user friendliness and discuss concepts and ideas. Most of this task has now been completed.

A help guide is being built into Flux 2, this is a work in progress with each update you get more. You also have the forum.

Flux 2 has the ability to change the Doctype and code to suit including html5 and xhtml1.1 so is looking at the future. As for the past old browsers will never support the features and code the new ones do. The web is evolving all the time and I guess there will be some browser incompatibilities in the future as there has in the past these are something the web designer has to work with.

I repeat IMO go Flux 2.

[john3mac]

Definite Third on the suggestion for a CODA plugin.

It'd bring a lot of CODA users to Flux. CODA plus Flux would kill Dreamweaver.

I am learning to use both Coda and Flux. CODA is much better for learning code and for doing hand-coding. Whereas FLUX is great for modifying content and layout.

Also, I really love how CODA syncs with the Finder files (if I make a change to a css file with TextEdit, for example, and the change is synced with CODA and vice-versa). I wish Flux did this.

I also wish Flux's Site Manager was more like CODA's Site Manager, which mirror's Apple's Finder.
Flux Site Manager is just plain clumsy compared to the "Finder style", especially as I add more and more files and folders to a site.

Sincerely,
John