

Macaw Scarlet – Live Design Environment - jacobwg
http://scarlet.macaw.co/

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orthecreedence
Is it just me or is modern web design degrading into flash-era sludge where
you have to sit and watch 20 seconds of lines dancing around before you can
get any information? As a nerd who can appreciate the technical aspects I'm
even finding it extremely overdone and obnoxious. There are cases, such as
telling an interesting/interactive story, where it makes complete sense.
However for an informational/product web site, I'm generally not there to be
W0W3d by your 31337 w3b skillz.

Am I just old fashioned?

~~~
interactiv
This is a tool for web designers so it makes sense to try something a bit
flashy. Now is it efficient or does it help convey a specific message I don't
know. To their credit the site is responsive and there is less animation on
smaller screens.

As an ex flash designer, the problem is often that doing these kind of stunts
in HTML5 takes way to much time for an average result at best. And the browser
tends to behave in unexpected ways( horrible lags when scrolling in Firefox,
timing will always be an issue when it comes to webtechs and
animation,especially with CSS animations that are totally unreliable , Flash
kind of guaranteed a stable frame rate at the price of a higher memory and cpu
cost ).

People are also less patient today, they want to get what something is about
in less than 10 seconds when they visit a new website.

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atourgates
Does anyone have experience with Macaw? Are you using it regularly?

I tried the demo a couple times, but didn't fall in love. It seems like a very
compelling piece of software, so I'd like to hear if people using it.

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erickhill
Yes, unfortunately I have some mild experience with the original release.

"The previous version of Macaw – soon to be rebranded as Macaw Indigo –
excelled at prototyping and mockups. Said another way, Indigo is best for
earlier stage, conceptual work and Scarlet is best for getting to production."

So the version I foolishly funded via Kickstarter (come on, it looked
gorgeous) and discarded immediately is getting rebranded and the new version
is being sold as the version I _thought_ "indigo" was supposed to be.

They should have just released "Macaw 2.0" and fixed the whole shebang, and
possibly given early adopters a major discount. All this does is 1) create
confusion and 2) skepticism of the company. It didn't have to be this way,
IMO.

~~~
ics
Before there were any comments I thought about typing roughly the same
sentiment. I only spent a few hours in Macaw before realizing it wouldn't
actually help me get work done and figured I'd take another look when they got
around to implementing more than the basics. Based on my experience I also
took this announcement as essentially spinning off the useful parts (which
regular Macaw users have probably been looking forward to) into a separate
product. They have a trial which I recommend, since you can get a feel for the
product pretty quickly now that it's actually available. As for what comes
next, I'll evaluate it when it's an actual piece of software.

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detaro
Ah yes, the design environment for the web where all your users have new
gaming PCs... (the i5 with a mid-class GPU below my desk can't display that
page smoothly)

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vortico
I smiled in irony as the "Design for Responsive" text scrolled by at 0.5 fps.

~~~
mikekchar
It is possible that you are "old" like me and thought that "responsive" meant
"responds quickly to your input". These days "responsive" means that if you
have a different size display than the person who designed the website, it
isn't foobared. It is very difficult for me to repress snarky comments about
the state of web design these days, but then I have to remember how ugly the
web used to be in the good old days... Flashing red text on blue tiled
backgrounds still haunt my dreams.

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PebblesHD
The idea is great, the concept of creating professional grade tools for
something is admirable, but in this particular case, whats wrong with
Brackets/Sublime/DW/Notepad and a web browser? I find trying to use these new
tools results in me spending most of my time either fighting with them or
writing custom code outside of them to get what I want done anyway. The
website itself looks cool but has an awful frame rate on my i7 Laptop with
16GB of RAM and a Quadro 1GB, which isnt exactly slow.

~~~
interactiv
> whats wrong with Brackets/Sublime/DW/Notepad and a web browser

Designers usually have a "visual first" approach, developers tend to have a
"code first" approach. So a tool that allows setting up stuff visually instead
of writing code in a text editor will make designers more productive.

I've been using Fireworks and Dreamweaver for 15 years and haven't found a
good alternative to that. Fireworks is(was) very good at dealing with web
assets,it was easy to write macros and extensions in JS, Dreamweaver has good
templating capabilities (a bit like static site generators) which makes
maintaining complex layouts on multiple pages really really easy for web
designers.

The issue with Dreamweaver is obviously the fact that it's out of touch with
modern web design (very little support for CSS frameworks and pre-processors,
text editor below average, and of course Adobe succeeded in killing the best
thing Macromedia had achieved,creating an awesome community around its
products).As for Fireworks it's dead.

So designers like me are always watching for alternative tools that could
replace these. There is a serious need for innovation in that space. I don't
think the UI for such a tool should be 100% web based however.

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hayksaakian
wow that's the first time in years that a website crashed my entire computer
(currently using a 1.3ghz dual core new macbook)

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sdrothrock
I'm confused about Scarlet's place in the lineup.

Is it a complementary product for Macaw (now Indigo, apparently), or is it a
successor?

~~~
michaelbuddy
Macaw indigo was really an app for starting a design but it worked via a
proprietary file format. It could export html but couldn't open it. This new
program opens html and works within it but has less drawing capability and
seems to be more for tweaking like you might do with a text editor otherwise.

