Markupwand (YC S12) Takes The Pain Out Of Translating Photoshop Files To HTML | Hacker News Reader

Markupwand (YC S12) Takes The Pain Out Of Translating Photoshop Files To HTML

techcrunch.com

I would never do this for a website or web app, but if they could make it code emails that work in every email client I would use it immediately. I don't care how shitty the code looks.

I don't see why you couldn't use this to create an HTML email template?

It's a neat idea. It'll be a lot of work to get right. In the meantime, I can send a psd, png, whatever to cssilize and have it chopped up by a human into great looking html and images and I don't have to piece-meal the psd myself to conform to what markupwand needs:

http://www.cssilize.com

It's like $35 or something per page.

this is still manual. This is the exact problem markup wand solves.. isnt it :)

To me, this is useful for making testable prototypes, or sites that need to be thrown together on very short order with a short lifespan.

But unless they're able to generate responsive layouts and markup that's not semantic & clean, it's not useful beyond that.

True, but for a v1 product this will help designers push as fast as engineers.

they are a smart team. im sure they will get there soon, if they dont do it now.

I'm working on something that hopefully will, if you're using Bootstrap as a base: http://jetstrap.com/

Of course, this is not a photoshop->responsive tool, but it skips the first part.

That is interesting, just added myself to alpha list. Eager to try it out!

Thanks! We are going to be rolling out the alpha really soon, just fixing some annoying bugs.

I don't understand how people are still designing for the web in an image manipulation application. There are so many other tools out there today to get you to a design much quicker than Photoshop.

Maybe you could give some examples of those tools? I'm not asking to be snarky - I'm genuinely curious.

There are quite a few new services emerging that are making designers less dependent on drawing tools:

* Gridset (http://gridsetapp.com) -- for working out your grid and bringing it into a prototype

* Typecast (http://beta.typecastapp.com) -- design with web fonts

* Easel (http://easel.io) -- a browser-based alternative to Fireworks

* CSS Piffle (http://csspiffle.com) -- haven't actually used this yet but looks similar to Easel from the outside

* Adobe Muse (http://www.adobe.com/products/muse.html) -- not well received but maybe an indication of Adobe's future direction

[disclaimer: I'm part of the Typecast team].

Photoshop and Fireworks are great and I don't see many designers abandoning desktop software entirely. But I think there are plenty of tools that can help you get into the browser more quickly.