Review: Flux 2
- Article 7 of 19
- MacUser, February 2010
Flux is very much worth looking at if you're a web designer for whom other tools aren't powerful enough or are too expensive.
Dreamweaver is the daddy when it comes to web development, so if you want to use any other application for web design, you'll need a very good reason. At a penny under £50, Flux 2 is certainly the right price, and its compelling features means it can stand toe to toe with Dreamweaver, and sometimes it even comes out on top. The program is particularly good for Mac users since it uses Mac OS X technologies, including MobileMe, Core Image graphics editing, iLife integration and Safari bookmarks, which Dreamweaver doesn't.
Flux 2 doesn't employ the drag-and-drop approach of Dreamweaver and Freeway. Instead, you select a point on the page, use the pull-down menus to create an object on the page at that point, and then resize or adjust the object appropriately. Objects include not just standard HTML objects such as tables and forms, but also Flash and YouTube videos, as well as HTML 5 containers such as <figure>.
The application also comes with tools for creating multi-column layouts and palettes, toolbar icons and other pull-down menus for modifying elements. A good knowledge of CSS attributes, HTML and HTML structuring is assumed, though, since a lot of the time you're going to be editing code, as well as doing standard layout tricks.
Flux features a site management system, so you can organise collections of pages and assets. This can be used to import existing website folders or create new sites, and then publish them to a server via FTP or SFTP, or using the built-in support for your MobileMe website. The application can also import and unpack web archives saved from Safari. New in Flux 2 is the ability to edit files while they're still on the server without downloading them to your local website folder.
As well as modifying the HTML and CSS to achieve specific looks, you can take advantage of integration with a wide range of third-party technologies and libraries, including Prototype, jQuery, Lightbox, Baseline CSS and Fluid 960 Grid system.
A number of plug-ins have also been developed especially for Flux, including rounded corner graphics for image galleries. Once you've installed the packages to your site directory, you can attach triggers and actions to page elements. You can also select any image in the site manager and apply filters, such as drop shadows, directly to it without leaving Flux.
Flux supports a number of dynamic web page programming languages, including PHP, Ruby, Yuma and Django. Since it also has a WebKit-based live preview system, you can see what your pages will look like in Safari as you develop them, as well as how the dynamic content will render if you have the binaries installed on your Mac. Flux also enables you to use a custom preview environment, so you can use MAMP. It doesn't include Dreamweaver's ability to connect to databases, though.
Flux 2 is an improvement over Flux 1 in terms of usability, with a more streamlined workflow, less emphasis on code and more assistants to help you get started. However, while it should be easier to use than Dreamweaver, since it employs a more standard Mac OS X interface (you never need to hunt through stacks of palettes for the correct icons), it's less intuitive. Its constant emphasis on tags and structural elements means that, even though you can turn off the pervasive labelling that was in Flux 1, you'll always be thinking of code, no matter how visual a designer you may be.
For £49.99, however, Flux 2 is an incredibly powerful tool. Although not as intuitive as iWeb, it comes with decent templates for beginners, and gives you access to functions and code control of which iWeb users can only dream.
At the high end, it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Dreamweaver - in particular, it lacks any workgroup functions, mobile-web specific tools or support for Dreamweaver's extensions; its code-editing is slower than Dreamweaver's as well. It's pretty close in terms of power and costs only a fraction of the price, though.