Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Webdesign tool Macaw raises $275k on Kickstarter, $200k more than original goal
21–30 of 63 posts
Re: Webdesign tool Macaw raises $275k on Kickstarter, $200k more than original goal
#22When Adobe buys them up, will funders get shares of Adobe stock?
Re: Webdesign tool Macaw raises $275k on Kickstarter, $200k more than original goal
#23Designers, what is M∀CAW still missing? (serious answers please)
Re: Webdesign tool Macaw raises $275k on Kickstarter, $200k more than original goal
#24Macaw 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…
Macaw doesn't strike me as anything like Fireworks, other than the fact it is a tool for people creating assets for the web. Fireworks's killer feature was that it merged both vector and bitmap creation tools. Fireworks was great but it was primarily focused on creating image assets that will be displayed on a web page. (The best tool for this nowadays imho is Sketch.)
Macaw is basically taking another stab at the Dreamweaver model. The major hurdle I see for it is that it seems to be a one-way street if you go by the demo. You can generate code from a Macaw project, but you can't just pop open your existing html/css and start working with it. The main asset you are working with is a mcw file.
For real-world work on serious projects, people in the trenches are going to manually hack on the CSS. They're also going to be generating HTML on the fly with code and will need templates to plug into their view system. The creators of Macaw seem like they know what they're doing but they need to have a story for how they fit into a real workflow before this makes sense. Their smart code generator looks like it will be great for getting a mockup together, but the killer app will be is if this tool can be used throughout the life of an app to iterate on its design.
Re: Webdesign tool Macaw raises $275k on Kickstarter, $200k more than original goal
#25A tangent, but that brings me back to this again:
"Kickstarter cannot be used to fund websites or apps focused on e-commerce, business, and social networking."
It's a weird rule. This tool has business applications, no? (Also not, but still...)
More on topic, I'll bet these guys are going to have a wild and successful ride.
I think cross-platform support will be key, too (one of the consistent complaints about Pixelmator, as a semi-related example, is that there isn't a PC version available).
Re: Webdesign tool Macaw raises $275k on Kickstarter, $200k more than original goal
#26So .. we're all CS guys here. Does anyone have any idea as to how such a system can work? Just curious as to how they're making it work.
Re: Webdesign tool Macaw raises $275k on Kickstarter, $200k more than original goal
#27When Adobe buys them up, will funders get shares of Adobe stock?
Ha, was thinking about Adobe already, too. Users will rue the day.
But for the founders' benefit: hey Adobe, go look at their Kickstarter. Why don't you just acqui-hire these guys right now?
Re: Webdesign tool Macaw raises $275k on Kickstarter, $200k more than original goal
#28Macaw 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…
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 mind so we don't have a skewed developer perspective. Hand coding is a poor medium for prototyping or doing design mock ups, but can be quite fast if you know exactly what you are doing and you already have image assets.
Another under served market are designers that love using Photoshop, especially to do mock ups and prototypes, but cringe when it comes to turning those mock ups into actual web sites. Unfortunately, Photoshop has basically the worst tools, if you can call them that, for turning Photoshop images into a websites.
Our response is a tool we call Webbsy.
Basically, you just name any layer or layer group like a CSS selector like #header or .header. Run Webbsy, and it slices all the images and generates the HTML and CSS using the names you gave it.
Like Macaw, it generates clean HTML using static positioning and floats and divs with clear. It respects layer groupings as well so if your #logo layer is inside your #header layer, the HTML/CSS will do the same. It uses static positioning by default, but allows the use of absolute positioning as well. Actually, until I saw the Macaw video, I thought we were the only ones who had an algorithm for making code that doesn't use absolute positioning.
This is really important because in a real website, the lines of text may render shorter or longer depending on the font rendering engine. This can cause unsightly overlaps or too much white space.
Webbsy also allows slicing, linking, it automatically makes Google fonts work, converts rectangles into divs, text is preserved as text, etc.
We also are just about to release our reference sheet feature. If you are a coder but just don't want to spend all the time doing rote monkey work like copying over fonts, spacings, colors, etc. then use the reference sheet. It generates all the CSS styling (but not positioning/layout) and shows you thumbnails of all the assets. You then write all the layout and HTML by hand but still save hours on transposing code.
Our next feature, coming soon, is auto export so you don't have to do any renaming of layers. This has less control and selectors are generated automatically but is perfect for showing clients a work in progress without having to ship JPEG or PNG images through email. This also means you get real previews so your fonts look like they would in a website. One problem with mockups is that your 9px font looks fine using Photoshop's font rendering engine, but looks really bad in a browser rendering of a font. When a client asks for a few changes, you can make them in minutes and just re-build the site in Webbsy instead of wasting time trying to figure out how to modify the HTML/CSS.
Finally, we will be coming out with more modes and features that help designers that use Photoshop make conversions the way they want to. One of the things we recognize is that designers work in different ways. Some need to write all the code by hand (which is what our reference sheet is for) and others don't mind how the code looks as long as the web page looks right.
You can find us at www.webbsy.com
Sunny
Re: Webdesign tool Macaw raises $275k on Kickstarter, $200k more than original goal
#29It'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.
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 see it being accepted by people trying to get a simple site online for their mom and pop shop. Tools like WordPress are much better suited to their needs, and they can click a few buttons, get a theme, website, and CMS working in minutes.
What I would like to see is a tool to mockup changes to existing websites. For example, I enter a URL, and I can quickly drag and drop elements to different locations, adjust margins, widths, colors with a proper color picker, etc. I find I'm always using Firebug to try out style changes, but it's a little sluggish to constantly select elements, and manually modify CSS properties. Using an online app that's a little more interactive would be useful, and it doesn't need to produce proper code, since I'm only using it to visually see if these are changes I want to implement or not.
For example, I enter the URL to HN. I click the orange bar at the top, color pick it to green. Click the link headings, change them to bold red text, and slide up the line-height to add more spacing. I hit save, and it gives me a URL like jsfiddle that I can share with others. I can then post this to HN, and say, 'hey, what do you think of these changes to the HN layout?'. It's a quick way for multiple people to share ideas on improving an existing design, or users to share their suggestions with developers. It would be great for meetings too. Let's drag our left column a little bigger, maybe scale these heading down a bit, and drag our logo over here. Yep, that looks a little better, have the development team code those change up and push it live.