Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

kickstarter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 63 posts

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

#11

Post by nilliams »

adamnemecek wrote: post #8
rfnslyr wrote: 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.

Is this opinion this generation's version of "Real men only write code in (C|assembly|Fortran)"?

Well it's not quite so transparent in its naivete, since a lot of people have tried and failed to create decent visual editors for HTML & CSS in the past.

This particular editor does seem a significantly better attempt than previous efforts though, namely that it seems to be written with a understanding of the equivalent, idiomatic code.

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

#12

Post by fatbat »

rfnslyr wrote: 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.

Depends on your end goal I suppose. Not everyone wants to learn development. Some people just prefer getting things done and this tool certainly has potential to help in that regard.

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

#13

Post by dopamean »

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?

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

#14

Post by CompelTechnic »

dopamean wrote: post #13

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 printing a handful of extra t-shirts).

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

#16

Post by bbx »

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 filled by any web design software. I think the keyword is "fluid". Unlike Photoshop, almost nothing in Macaw is engraved in pixels. You can easily modify elements without worrying about half-eaten pixels, resizable boxes or weird rounded borders.

Sounds like Fireworks? Yes, but Macaw adds a powerful feature (and probably the most criticized one): code generation. As some others said, it does sound like Dreamweaver. But Macaw's code quality is vastly superior and quite impressive.

Being a front-end developer and a graphic designer, I'm right in Macaw's target market. I think I'll try it out but I probably won't use much of the generated code. I'm comfortable enough with CSS to understand how my own written code will behave in the browser. I've developed best practices that would be hard to merge with any software generated code.

But Macaw is also a design tool with interesting features. And having missed the Fireworks train, I think I'll try to catch this one. My design process have grown simpler and more focused over the years, and although I'm comfortable with Photoshop, it sometimes feels like an overkill.

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

#17

Post by dopamean »

CompelTechnic wrote: post #14
dopamean wrote: post #13

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…

This makes sense. The cases I was thinking of were actually for companies planning on making physical products.

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

#18

Post by _wesley_ »

dopamean wrote: post #13

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?

You can put a cap on it by limiting the # of backers for any given reward level (this is what we did), but most of the big campaigns screw themselves by letting it overrun

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

#19

Post by dopamean »

_wesley_ wrote: post #18
dopamean wrote: post #13

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?

You can put a cap on it by limiting the # of backers for any given reward level (this is what we did), but most of the big campaigns screw themselves by letting it overrun

What was your product?

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

#20

Post by MisterBastahrd »

rfnslyr wrote: 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.

The purpose of web design is to create a document which is appealing to the eye and is laid out in a logically consistent manner. It is a pain in the ass to jump back and forth between an HTML document and a style sheet in order to get various page elements sized correctly and with the right padding/shading/etc. Macaw gives people all of the settings they need side by side with a visual representation of their document. It isn't meant to replace hand-coding. It's instead meant to complement it by taking the pain out of the design work.
Post reply on HN