Ah yes, the design environment for the web where all your users have new gaming PCs... (the i5 with a mid-class GPU below my desk can't display that page smoothly)
I smiled in irony as the "Design for Responsive" text scrolled by at 0.5 fps.
Macaw Scarlet – Live Design Environment
11–20 of 22 posts
Re: Macaw Scarlet – Live Design Environment
#12Is it just me or is modern web design degrading into flash-era sludge where you have to sit and watch 20 seconds of lines dancing around before you can get any information? As a nerd who can appreciate the technical aspects I'm even finding it extremely overdone and obnoxious. There are cases, such as telling an interesting/interactive story, where it makes complete sense. However for an informational/product web sit…
I'm with you. As I was loading the page, it felt like one of those dreaded old splash pages.
Re: Macaw Scarlet – Live Design Environment
#13Does anyone have experience with Macaw? Are you using it regularly? I tried the demo a couple times, but didn't fall in love. It seems like a very compelling piece of software, so I'd like to hear if people using it.
I bought it, spent like a day in it, and then uninstalled it and returned to sublime text. It's just one of those tools who has a single purpose and as soon as you try to do something outside of it, you need to use something else. I mean HTML/CSS isn't exactly the most hard thing to rite in the world.
Pretty much my experience as well. Bought it at a good discount, tried to make it work (consumed all books, online tutorials and examples before that) and went back to my text editor and Bootstrap after 2 days after discovering that I was spending more time fighting with the tool than creating useful things in it.
Re: Macaw Scarlet – Live Design Environment
#14Is it just me or is modern web design degrading into flash-era sludge where you have to sit and watch 20 seconds of lines dancing around before you can get any information? As a nerd who can appreciate the technical aspects I'm even finding it extremely overdone and obnoxious. There are cases, such as telling an interesting/interactive story, where it makes complete sense. However for an informational/product web sit…
I guess, like every form of advertising, you have to know your market.
This tool seems targetted specifically at designers and front end devs, a distinctly visual group with a high level of overlap with the "appreciates cool front end techniques" group. Maybe in this case it's actually a canny strategy for getting their attention?
If this was a tool for capturing and analysing network packets in vim, probably not as appropriate...
I also noted that the site loaded and animated poorly in FF, but was much smoother in Chrome. I thought it was a much nicer experience when I switched browsers. Does that say anything about this tool? Possibly!
Re: Macaw Scarlet – Live Design Environment
#15Is it just me or is modern web design degrading into flash-era sludge where you have to sit and watch 20 seconds of lines dancing around before you can get any information? As a nerd who can appreciate the technical aspects I'm even finding it extremely overdone and obnoxious. There are cases, such as telling an interesting/interactive story, where it makes complete sense. However for an informational/product web sit…
This is a tool for web designers so it makes sense to try something a bit flashy. Now is it efficient or does it help convey a specific message I don't know. To their credit the site is responsive and there is less animation on smaller screens.
As an ex flash designer, the problem is often that doing these kind of stunts in HTML5 takes way to much time for an average result at best. And the browser tends to behave in unexpected ways( horrible lags when scrolling in Firefox, timing will always be an issue when it comes to webtechs and animation,especially with CSS animations that are totally unreliable , Flash kind of guaranteed a stable frame rate at the price of a higher memory and cpu cost ).
People are also less patient today, they want to get what something is about in less than 10 seconds when they visit a new website.
Re: Macaw Scarlet – Live Design Environment
#16wow that's the first time in years that a website crashed my entire computer (currently using a 1.3ghz dual core new macbook)
Re: Macaw Scarlet – Live Design Environment
#17The idea is great, the concept of creating professional grade tools for something is admirable, but in this particular case, whats wrong with Brackets/Sublime/DW/Notepad and a web browser? I find trying to use these new tools results in me spending most of my time either fighting with them or writing custom code outside of them to get what I want done anyway. The website itself looks cool but has an awful frame rate…
> whats wrong with Brackets/Sublime/DW/Notepad and a web browser
Designers usually have a "visual first" approach, developers tend to have a "code first" approach. So a tool that allows setting up stuff visually instead of writing code in a text editor will make designers more productive.
I've been using Fireworks and Dreamweaver for 15 years and haven't found a good alternative to that. Fireworks is(was) very good at dealing with web assets,it was easy to write macros and extensions in JS, Dreamweaver has good templating capabilities (a bit like static site generators) which makes maintaining complex layouts on multiple pages really really easy for web designers.
The issue with Dreamweaver is obviously the fact that it's out of touch with modern web design (very little support for CSS frameworks and pre-processors, text editor below average, and of course Adobe succeeded in killing the best thing Macromedia had achieved,creating an awesome community around its products).As for Fireworks it's dead.
So designers like me are always watching for alternative tools that could replace these. There is a serious need for innovation in that space. I don't think the UI for such a tool should be 100% web based however.
Re: Macaw Scarlet – Live Design Environment
#18I'm confused about Scarlet's place in the lineup.
Is it a complementary product for Macaw (now Indigo, apparently), or is it a successor?
Re: Macaw Scarlet – Live Design Environment
#19Is it just me or is modern web design degrading into flash-era sludge where you have to sit and watch 20 seconds of lines dancing around before you can get any information? As a nerd who can appreciate the technical aspects I'm even finding it extremely overdone and obnoxious. There are cases, such as telling an interesting/interactive story, where it makes complete sense. However for an informational/product web sit…
i'm a designer .. and learned to program 7 years ago . i really miss flash as a way to design experiences ! thinking design in html/js/css is a horrible way to live !
Re: Macaw Scarlet – Live Design Environment
#20Ah yes, the design environment for the web where all your users have new gaming PCs... (the i5 with a mid-class GPU below my desk can't display that page smoothly)
I smiled in irony as the "Design for Responsive" text scrolled by at 0.5 fps.
It is possible that you are "old" like me and thought that "responsive" meant "responds quickly to your input". These days "responsive" means that if you have a different size display than the person who designed the website, it isn't foobared. It is very difficult for me to repress snarky comments about the state of web design these days, but then I have to remember how ugly the web used to be in the good old days... Flashing red text on blue tiled backgrounds still haunt my dreams.