Sneak peek of Macaw – a code-savvy web design tool [video]

It's a big enough market that the more variety of tools that exist, the better, as designers can find the tool that they like the best, instead of the bad old days where it was Photoshop or Fireworks, and they both were crap for web design.

What's interesting is to compare and contrast the difference between a tool like this on the desktop, and tools like mine that are web-based (see easel, divshot, webflow, probably 1 or 2 more that I'm forgetting, etc...)

Being on the desktop gives them a bit more power and control over the user interface, as well as super-easy importing of external assets.

Being web-based allows me to do neat things like have live-updating preview links, so you can immediately see how the design works or breaks on a bunch of screens at once. Also importing HTML content from any URL, for doing quick responsive redesigns. I still have some work to do on the output CSS being more optimized, but for prototyping and being wildly creative in a flexible web canvas, you can't beat it.

[1] http://edit-room.com

I agree there is a need, but I think that need is exaggerated, writing html / css is pretty easy, its not fun but its generally nothing compared to the overall work, half the time you still have to do it manually anyway since it has to fit into frameworks etc.

I want something that lets me focus on the design aspect, it should have nice snap to grid features, ability to inspect and edit css, but it should also have a vector drawing tools, image manipulations. The current set of design tools have terrible support for most common web functionality, photoshop doesnt even have rounded borders, illustrator / fireworks / sketch / pixelmator all almost entirely ignore things that are important for designing for the web. However web based editors almost all lack any graphical and vector capabilities whatsoever.

I started on this and gave up a while ago, http://upmock.com/ and wrote about it http://arandomurl.com/2012/10/15/upmock-is-dead.html. Currently the most promising so far has been SVG Edit, however it doesnt seem particularly active nor has there been a focus on producing web designs

When tools break away from old ways of "doing things" you can end up with much more exciting stuff. I know that I fall into past behavior when pressed for time (which is every project ever) and if I had an easier way to experiment, I might try something different.

I'm hoping it has some idea of optimization though. He was dragging out individual icons for every social button and logo and whatever. It doesn't seem like sprite sheets are possible here but maybe? I don't imagine sass/less support here but that would be neat.

Finally, I'd love to see how they are building the app itself. Is this a Chrome embedded app?

Something I did note was that the pre-used class names weren't auto-suggested; eg on the footer buttons. Sure that'll get fixed. Also perhaps value snapping to avoid values like "29.608938547486037%"?

Everything else looked pretty slick though.

Didn't see the GA code being added in the video. Also it seems like Typekit was integrated to get some of the typographical flexibility.

Generally though I really liked it; seems very promising.

For a specific example as to why, look no further than the first 4 minutes where the creator "imports all these assets we made". Made where?!

My design team doesn't work like that. No design team does. They don't "make one thing over and then plug it in over here". They make everything together in one program. Because it's impossible to jump between two different apps when you're exploring a creative concept. You don't think to yourself, "OK, I'll need this icon and this icon and maybe a background image with these precise filters applied and it'll have a sidebar so I'll need a texture for that..."

You open Photoshop, or Illustrator, or Pixelmator and you start trying things until something you've tried looks good.

While it'd be great to see design tools that actually took the intricacies of HTML structure and CSS into account, tools like Macaw (and all the others I've seen) all fall down for real work.

I'm definitely excited for this one.

Visually it looks awesome, but what it really comes down to is the quality of the code. Most WYSIWYG editors leave a lot to be desired.

Second, I am always wary of amazing tools with unknown pricepoints. I get that you're still early, but some semblance of cost structure would be great. Frankly, I don't know if you're going to charge $1500 or $5 a month or free. I just don't know, there's too many ways you could choose to market this, and that insecurity, that lack of knowledge makes me uncomfortable.

That being said, great job on the concept and I can't wait to see what it looks like when it goes live.

If you have something like this....why use Bootstrap?

Can't wait for you to release it.

Wow, fantastic job, the smart and pretty CSS/HTML output is the icing on the cake.

It states in the video this is a native app, but written with HTML/CSS. Would be interested to know if this was written in node-webkit (like Light Table), or if not, what?

[1] https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit

It's desktop, so unlikely to have a monthly model.