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Comment by splatcollision | Hacker News Reader

The problem with this and other photoshop > CSS tools, is that you're still stuck with Photoshop. We should be elevating design by designing web native and making it beautiful, not using the same old fixed desktop beasts. Edit Room [1] and the like (typecast [2], etc.) will be the wave of the future. Great web design requires great human communication, which means great typography. You can't get close to the real web type display with Photoshop, and this tool won't help there.

Unlike Edit Room, using Photoshop + Markupwand generates all units in pixels - not too useful for real multi-device prototyping. Others have mentioned the tag soup. It's fine for those who can't move on from Photoshop, but more and more folks are interested in trying something new.

[1] http://www.edit-room.com/ (my project, friendly critiques welcome) [2] http://beta.typecastapp.com/

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Just to prove a point, I roughly re-created the sample PSD on the markupwand page in my tool, Edit Room:

http://www.edit-room.com/review/RnNDyuCX

It's not pixel-perfect, but it is flexible and responsive, and should work decently well across different screens for 5 minutes of work.

(I don't support images yet, so you won't see icons or an avatar, but the type and grid and color and shape and all those important things about design are well-represented)

What you show in the video looks pretty good. A few things that caught my eye:

The signup form is unconventional. that in itself is ok. but the cleartext password text field is a really bad practice. Also the whole thing just looks very hand-stricken, you know what I mean? I'm not that much of a designer myself, maybe others have a different taste.

I really hope you succeed, overall I think it's a very good idea. I like the abundance of CSS options and the format pasting you show in the video very much. The video makes me want to use it right away.

Cool, thanks for the notes. I'll research the password field a bit more, I was going for the increased usability, but security (and perceived security) are important as well.

I'm working on improving the design of the controls, etc, based on some other feedback. It's definitely hand-made, if that's what you're referring to.

Thanks for the good wishes! Glad the video was helpful.

Why are cleartext password fields bad practice? How many accounts are actually compromised via shoulder surfing? They're especially annoying on mobile phones.

edit: Since there are password fields, I guess the question should have been "How many accounts _would_ be compromised by shoulder surfing?" I bet it's a truly insignificant number.

1) As OP has pointed out, security is not just about effective security, it's also about the perceived one. Cleartext passwords are so unusual it makes me question as a user, how things are handled in the backend.

2) I don't see the problem on mobiles. Not sure about Android or WP but at least on iOS I always see the last character that is entered. Still vulnerable to shoulder peeking but not as bad as cleartext.

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