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Webdesign tool Macaw raises $275k on Kickstarter, $200k more than original goal

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Re: Webdesign tool Macaw raises $275k on Kickstarter, $200k more than original goal

#51
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of agree. I can't imagine it being popular with professional web developers or designers. Working with modern HTML and CSS is fairly straightforward and quick for development. I see sorting out edge cases and bugs produced by code in Macaw would leave you better off writing the code from scratch. Plus, like you said, this has the benefit of being educational and transferring over to other work. I also can't se…

This idea is awesome. I hope someone builds it.

Someone made a tool just like that and posted it on HN a while ago. I can't remember the name of it unfortunately but maybe another commenter can. I think it had CSS in the title and it was essentially a tool to customize a live site with CSS and then share your result.

Re: Webdesign tool Macaw raises $275k on Kickstarter, $200k more than original goal

#53
post #6

It's so much easier and rewarding to just learn the basic code to structure a webpage. What if I don't really know much web dev, but master this tool? Where will that get me? "So it shows here you've developed 8 websites for clients, wow, what does your stack look like?" "Oh I kinda just mastered this one specific tool, I don't really know how to code." Reminds me of Dreamweaver days.

"These are really great illustrations! What tools did you use?"

"I used Adobe Illustrator and then exported them as SVG files."

"SVG files are just text files. They look kind of like HTML. You should really use Vim to code SVG files. It's so much easier and more rewarding. Illustrator is for babies."

Re: Webdesign tool Macaw raises $275k on Kickstarter, $200k more than original goal

#54
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This idea is awesome. I hope someone builds it.

Someone made a tool just like that and posted it on HN a while ago. I can't remember the name of it unfortunately but maybe another commenter can. I think it had CSS in the title and it was essentially a tool to customize a live site with CSS and then share your result.

Could it be tomodo.com?

Re: Webdesign tool Macaw raises $275k on Kickstarter, $200k more than original goal

#55
Was it just me, or did they write Macaw up to now, based on the demo video, in JavaScript, CSS and HTML5 like Adobe is doing with its own tools? http://topcoat.io anyone?

Not to dismiss the work, as to me this should mean getting it cross-platform that much faster. ;-)

Re: Webdesign tool Macaw raises $275k on Kickstarter, $200k more than original goal

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Full disclosure, my company just released a Photoshop plugin that converts Photoshop images into web sites. First of all, I think the idea behind Macaw is great. A lot of the people at my company really admire their work and there is a solid target market that would want to use Macaw. One of the things to keep in mind is that the target market is, likely, primarily designers and not developers. Important to keep in m…

With the increased growth of mobile devices and massive numbers of screen sizes in existence, how do you plan to handle those issues? What I've seen of Macaw looks like it gives you the ability to write clean, maintainable code that works in many devices and handles media-queries etc. From your examples I looked at, they might as well be absolutely positioned because you're not gaining anything by floating every elem…

Hi Proexploit,

That's a good question. And I'll address it but first I'd like to make a clarification.

You mention that if all the floating elements have fixed width and height, then what benefit is there versus simply using absolute positioning.

So, for clarity, if we did give widths and heights to all elements, then yes, apart from perhaps some code readability, there wouldn't be many other benefits; however, we don't actually give heights to text elements. This allows the browser to flow the text dynamically and because of this, it is possible that text will render shorter or longer than in the original Photoshop file because of where the text breaks at the end of the line. This can be exasperated when certain fonts like Arial may display as Helvetica and visa versa depending on the operating system.

Elements that are under the text will either pull up or push down as the text gets shorter or longer. There is also another benefit in that if you tie the code into something like a CMS where the images or text are editable, then the layout will reflow in the way you would expect.

The question was: How do we handle mobile devices or devices with different screen sizes?

There are actually ways that we can support this in the future and it might even take just a few days to write it. We currently have a full generated internal DOM that we convert to HTML and CSS. We also export to other formats. For example, I forgot to mention this earlier, but we also automatically export in LESS, HAML, Slim, Jade, Less, SASS, SCSS and Stylus.

I haven't thought this all the way through, but I don't think it will be difficult for us to export all of the elements so that they are always stacked for use in mobile devices and resize images to fit better. We can probably share the HTML code and then provide a different version of the CSS for mobile. There are some more details than that I can think of already, but they can probably all be overcome.

I would like to address that this isn't the typical use case if you are designing your website in Photoshop. In such a case where you wish to use identical code to support multiple screen sizes, you would probably hand write code with a grid to achieve this. Even in this scenario, however, our software can help you slice images, generate HTML and CSS styling code and put it in a reference page to make it much easier for you to code the final page. This will still massively accelerate your web page development, of course under the assumption you are using Photoshop. If you don't care to use Photoshop, and if you are more of a developer than a designer than there may not be much benefit in doing your prototyping this way, then our software is not a good choice for you.

Again, we think Macaw is cool, but you aren't, at this point anyways, going to get anything near the depth, maturity, familiarity and available knowledge on the web for an image editor as Photoshop. For designers, it is probably appealing to use a tool that they already know well and is very good at what it does. I don't think Macaw is trying to compete as an image editor though. So you'd probably build your image assets in something like Photoshop and then import and layout in Macaw. For some, they may prefer everything in a single tool.

Re: Webdesign tool Macaw raises $275k on Kickstarter, $200k more than original goal

#57
post #16

Macaw is much closer to Fireworks than Photoshop. I've never used Fireworks but a colleague of mine did. It's so much better suited for web design. But Adobe failed to market it properly (I actually never heard of Fireworks before 2011, several years after I started). That's probably the reason why it's discontinued. Macaw tries to capitalize on this void left by Fireworks, a void that actually may have never been fi…

IIRC, Fireworks would do code generation. I'm pretty sure that was the big selling point for some colleagues back in ... 1999? They were so awestruck that it would generate code for anything they threw at it. I was dumbstruck by 1) how bad the generated code was (a la FrontPage) and 2) how backwards some of the stuff they were trying to design was (making the code that much worse).

I know in the right hands, 'design first' in visual tools can lead to great web sites. Especially back in those days, however, visual artists were almost exclusively just visual/photoshop/paper oriented, and regardless of what they did, you were just expected to hack it up in to HTML, regardless of whether it was even possible or not. I far prefer working with graphic design folks who can at least do the basics of HTML/CSS, so they understand what's possible (and optimal) vs what Photoshop from 2000 is capable of letting them draw on the screen :)

Re: Webdesign tool Macaw raises $275k on Kickstarter, $200k more than original goal

#58
post #16

Macaw is much closer to Fireworks than Photoshop. I've never used Fireworks but a colleague of mine did. It's so much better suited for web design. But Adobe failed to market it properly (I actually never heard of Fireworks before 2011, several years after I started). That's probably the reason why it's discontinued. Macaw tries to capitalize on this void left by Fireworks, a void that actually may have never been fi…

Fireworks was made by Macromedia back then, and it was pretty popular amongst flash dev

Re: Webdesign tool Macaw raises $275k on Kickstarter, $200k more than original goal

#59

Maybe this isn't relevant but I've often wondered if it could be useful for people looking to raise money on Kickstarter to put a cap on the amount they raise. If you really only need 75k is it always a good thing to end up with way, way more than you asked for?

for people making physical products a cap would make sense. Printrbot was a pretty good example- order fulfillment took a lot longer than anticipated because of the high volume. On the other hand, delivering a desktop application is about equally difficult for 200 customers or 2000 customers, so the Macaw guys should just revel in their extra cash (aside from the stretch goals that they chose to take on as well, and…

Providing support to the extra 1800 customers, however, can be much more difficult.
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