The Escapers were founded in 2007, in London. Their first product is called Flux, and it is aimed at web designers who don’t want to use Dreamweaver CS3 for whatever reason. Perhaps you don’t have a need for Dreamweaver’s integration with the rest of Creative Suite 3, or you just don’t like the application but you also don’t want to be condemned to hand-coding your web site. In those cases, Flux comes to the rescue. But it comes at a price --and I don’t mean money.

Flux has been on my system for the best part of five weeks. That’s long, even with my one-man-does-it-all lead times. But I must admit, after having opened Flux the first time in March, I lost courage. Here was a program that looked great, that looked very promising even, but which I couldn’t decipher in a couple of minutes. As much as I hate this modern state-of-mind that wants everything now, if not yesterday, I simply couldn’t put myself to trying to make out something of the Help file. A manual was missing.

Inexpensive but Powerful

Nevertheless, the application puzzled me and for some strange, but interface-related reason I thought it deserved more than a thumbs down because I couldn’t make it work after a couple of minutes. Today is the day: I finally got around to sit at my desk and try get to grips with Flux. And if you are in web design --who isn’t, these days-- I would urge you to read on. My experiences with this application are so promising that I think Flux is nothing short of web designer’s gold.

But let me first warn you --and if The Escapers are reading this: please do carefully read what follows, let it sink in, don’t let your own ideas about how easy this application is get to you, and then go in turbo mode and write a decent manual. Flux deserves a decent manual, not a help file that sits in a tightly, cramped window on your web server. It deserves a manual because the program isn’t as easy to use as you think it is. It is not, and it shouldn’t be, either. It’s powerful, it’s a joy to work with, it can do everything a designer of web sites these days wants from a web design application. And it’s darn inexpensive at 47.10 EUR.

I’m warning users as well: Flux needs some stamina to get to the core of it, but once you understand the program’s concept and the basics of operation, it’s probably the best web design application that you’ll get your hands on which offers almost everything Dreamweaver does.

Flux’s basic operation is easy: you create a new web site (with or without a template), an empty window opens and then you’re stuck. Well, not really, because you can --at this point-- still easily figure out that you’ll need to create a new page. And then you’re really stuck, because it’s not clear-cut that you also need a new CSS page. But indeed, you do, as Flux is all about state-of-the-art web design and coding.

AJAX and Ruby on Rails Supported

Once you’ve created the necessary pages, you’ll double-click that first web page and you’ll have opened the empty web page. An icon called “New Element” will make it clear to you that you can create an iFrame, an Image placeholder, a general content DIV, an AJAX, Ruby on Rails, or simple Javascript code snippet, and more.

So, you’ll boldly go ahead and click on DIV. And there you are, with an empty frame that you can drag around freely, or not --depending on whether the application is set up to produce Absolute or Relatively positioned DIVs. You’ll have to link to the empty CSS file first in order to make the elements behave the way you want them to. But even when you have linked --it’s here the learning curve becomes a bit steep, by lack of a good manual-- to that empty CSS file, you still can’t easily figure out how to create a CSS element that links to the HTML element you’ve just created.

If you have gone through the trouble of finding that out, you will see how elegant this Flux workflow really is. It’s pretty simple, after all, because all you have to do is create a CSS element and add that element to an Attribute field in the Inspector. Once you’ve done that, you’re set to go.

So, Flux is not as simple as a drawing web design program (such as iWeb or RapidWeaver), but it sure is a lot more powerful. It not only has AJAX capabilities, but also Javascript capabilities that do not require you to write code, a HTML element flow made visible as the flow between frames in InDesign or QuarkXPress, and the capabilities to use frameworks that are not natively supported by the program. An example is the Spry framework, which you can use inside Flux with only one requirement: you must tell the application which namespace you’re using.

Everything in Flux is labelled and has an Inspector. The Inspectors are neatly organised, but I would like to see the developers make the text a tiny bit larger --sometimes my old eyes have trouble seeing the field contents. CSS cascading is not entirely clear from the Flux interface, but then again, cascading is something I also can’t see in CSSEdit, my favourite CSS hand-coding environment.

There’s little that Flux isn’t good at. One thing that it has trouble with, is correctly converting existing web pages. I found that even simple layouts in XHTML would mess up the CSS, even when it all validates. But you’re probably not going to use Flux to edit existing web sites anyway. In my view, Flux is great to start coding in a visual manner, then at the very end and really when you must add code that Flux doesn’t know about, you can finish your web site in a manual coding application.

You can do the same in other GUI web design programs as well, of course, but the difference with Flux is that the latter will take you further than any other competing application, perhaps with the exception of Dreamweaver.