I have a few ideas for ways to improve Rapidweaver so I thought I would add them here and see what other ideas might emerge.
Ruler
When I used Freeway it included a ruler measurement down the side of the page so items could be accurately matched, not just by sight but with cold hard numbers. Being able to see that two items were exactly the same distance from the top or sides by measurement would be helpful.
In a similar line of thought and probably more Mac like, how about giving us guides that automatically tell us when certain elements are in line with each other. I recall iWeb had this ten years ago and Blocs App has this. You see it in Apple Pages, iBooks Author and other Mac Apps.
Colour
The colour picker used in Rapidweaver makes it hard to organise colour palettes and keep records of what is used and where. This is particularly bad if you have a site with sections that include subtle shifts in tone. Hmm which light grey did I use over there?
I would like a built in means to label colours with names that make sense to me and group them according to site projects, but also have them accessible for other projects if they might be useful.
Think of it along the lines of the current FTP bookmark system in RW. You have the details for FTP uploads or exports that can be named as you like but you can also access the details for any other project quickly and easily without having to see them permanently.
In Freeway you could choose a particular orange or blue and then label it with your own description. At the moment we can’t even delete colour samples that were previously dragged down for reference, let alone name them and these carry over across all projects. It’s a mess…
Taking this a step further, how about something that offers suggestions for complimentary colour combinations? Yes I know there are Apps that do this but to make this efficient it should be inside Rapidweaver.
History
How about a nice history palette like you find in other graphics or design Apps? Instead of pressing undo repeatedly I’d like to view the history of changes and just click on the appropriate step to go back there if I don’t like something new.
I’m interested in thoughts and other suggestions.
I am in complete agreement about the colour management and lack of a ruler. I use Sip and Euclid to provide the missing functions but think these should be part of RW. There are core design tools. Freeway had limitations, didn’t move in the right directions and failed to react to what the competition was doing, but it had some well executed functions.
RW’s newly emerging competition are doing some amazing things too.
Agreed on all counts. Freeway has not kept pace with the competition, but it has some solid features based around designers rather than just building an app to write code for websites.
The colour side needs a serious overhaul and it doesn’t have to wait until RW8. The more projects you do the more evident it becomes how limited the current setup is.
I deliberately avoided the phrase colour management because that could be easily confused with colour profiling etc. What we are talking about here is colour palette management.
Thanks for the mobirise link… I’ve been watching the development of http://blocsapp.com, I love their interface and how it uses the horizontal scroll for their blocs. It’s one thing that I never liked about RW is their UI.
One thing that I find irksome - is that I keep flipping from edit to preview.
Simply to view the outcome of my page as I am using a black background & bright text that is hard to read on the white background when in EDIT mode. Perhaps its the theme I’ve chosen, but in RW blog view, I can’t seem to achieve a readable background color.
Try & fix a typo under those circumstances: I cause 2 more while trying to fix 1.
Another might be reflow built into RW (assuming this is true & not operator-error).
Does it make sense to store color sets for text better?
