
Webdesign tool Macaw raises $275k on Kickstarter, $200k more than original goal - adamnemecek
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/macaw/macaw-the-code-savvy-web-design-tool
======
bbx
Macaw 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 filled by any web design software. I think the keyword is
"fluid". Unlike Photoshop, almost nothing in Macaw is engraved in pixels. You
can easily modify elements without worrying about half-eaten pixels, resizable
boxes or weird rounded borders.

Sounds like Fireworks? Yes, but Macaw adds a powerful feature (and probably
the most criticized one): code generation. As some others said, it does sound
like Dreamweaver. But Macaw's code quality is vastly superior and quite
impressive.

Being a front-end developer and a graphic designer, I'm right in Macaw's
target market. I think I'll try it out but I probably won't use much of the
generated code. I'm comfortable enough with CSS to understand how my own
written code will behave in the browser. I've developed best practices that
would be hard to merge with any software generated code.

But Macaw is also a design tool with interesting features. And having missed
the Fireworks train, I think I'll try to catch this one. My design process
have grown simpler and more focused over the years, and although I'm
comfortable with Photoshop, it sometimes feels like an overkill.

~~~
gfodor
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.

~~~
ibdknox
Reminds me of the early days of Microsoft FrontPage. Make some hand
modifications to the html and accidentally move something.

Then stare in terror as all of your work just disappears.

------
tomasien
Another of the "oh it's been tried a million times, it'll never work, it'll
never happen" ideas that are out there that might ACTUALLY work. I love those
kinds of ideas.

------
throwmeaway2525
A 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).

------
xmpir
Didn't Google just offer something very similar?
[https://www.google.com/webdesigner](https://www.google.com/webdesigner)

~~~
cobrabyte
Seems to be primarily aimed at creating ads. Also, it's been shown to create
code that's far from being considered semantic HTML.

------
dopamean
Maybe this isn't relevant but I've often wondered if it could be useful for
people looking to raise money on Kickstarter to put a cap on the amount they
raise. If you really only need 75k is it always a good thing to end up with
way, way more than you asked for?

~~~
CompelTechnic
for people making physical products a cap would make sense. Printrbot was a
pretty good example- order fulfillment took a lot longer than anticipated
because of the high volume.

On the other hand, delivering a desktop application is about equally difficult
for 200 customers or 2000 customers, so the Macaw guys should just revel in
their extra cash (aside from the stretch goals that they chose to take on as
well, and printing a handful of extra t-shirts).

~~~
venomsnake
Not entirely convinced. Too much money that you are obliged to spend can sink
a project just as well as underfunding.

Due to some "Mythical man month" reasons adding more people and features can
put you in quagmire easily unless you have very good project managers. I am
not sure even those could bear the influx of order of magnitude more money
than needed.

Kickstarters are not preorders.

~~~
wmf
Stretch goals _will_ extend the schedule (something that Kickstarter doesn't
really explain), but you don't have to have stretch goals. If people give you
more money than you need you can just keep it.

------
d0m
Is it possible to use it on an existing project? Change a couple things and
save it back without all the html/css being changed?

------
apierre
It looks very nice, it makes me think of Flux.

The problem with wysiwyg editors from previous generations (Dreamweaver,
Frontpage, etc) is that you could never arrange the layout the way you wanted
and ended up being developers worse enemies with the poor code being
generated.

Now you'll have the power of Photoshop (Positioning, layers, transparency,
etc) with a clean code output (grid aware, responsive, css3)

------
pbhjpbhj
>"Please note: Macaw v1 for Mac OS X should be ready to roll in January 2014.
We have already started on a PC version, but it may take a couple extra months
to polish up." //

Bah. Pet hate - Mac OS X runs on PCs.

Presumably they mean an MS Windows [8?] version? Wish people would be upfront
about this it's silly having to hunt around to find if they're supporting
Linux.

------
lstamour
Was it just me, or did they write Macaw up to now, based on the demo video, in
JavaScript, CSS and HTML5 like Adobe is doing with its own tools?
[http://topcoat.io](http://topcoat.io) anyone?

Not to dismiss the work, as to me this should mean getting it cross-platform
that much faster. ;-)

------
PixelCut
Macaw looks great for generating the CSS and HTML code.

For JavaScript Canvas or SVG code, we make a tool called WebCode
([http://www.webcodeapp.com](http://www.webcodeapp.com)).

WebCode is a vector drawing app that instantly generates code.

------
neovive
Looks interesting. My initial impression was that it reminded me of an Adobe
Edge app. I wonder if it will be compatible with existing frameworks, such as
Bootstrap, Foundation, etc.

------
nej
Curious if all the output code is arranged in absolute positioning.

~~~
ble
From macaw.co:

ABSOLUTE TO STATIC CONVERSION Macaw offers designers the freedom of absolute
positioning within the interface but will convert to a static document flow
upon export by calculating the necessary margins, padding, floats and clears.
It's the best of both worlds.

------
Segmentation
Designers, what is M∀CAW still missing? (serious answers please)

~~~
myk7
Importing already created projects and editing that website.

~~~
boucher
I was wondering if there would be any answers about this. Without that
feature, it's a one way tool: all changes must be made here, the compiled
product can't be usefully edited.

I imagine it would be pretty challenging to parse an existing website into
something usable, but it would definitely make the tool a lot more useful (not
to say it won't still be useful to lots of people).

~~~
adamnemecek
IIRC from the video, at Macaw's core is an embedded webkit engine so they
might not have to do any parsing at all but instead interface said engine.
That being said, I'm not quite sure how difficult it would be to go from
having it parsed to making something that can work with the parsed code since
it might have a structure that would have to be further parsed to extract the
meaning of the code.

------
oglo
So .. 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.

------
richardkmichael
Is it open source?

It would be really nice to see this come to Linux eventually too (though, the
KS FAQ indicates they're not looking at Linux at the moment).

~~~
blueblob
It always makes me sad when people don't support linux. Especially when they
are starting the design for Mac, it shouldn't be that hard to compile for
both.

------
oddshocks
"We have no plans to bring Macaw to Linux at this time. Once the Mac and
Windows versions are released we will look into Linux."

Eh.

------
yelnatz
The only bad thing about Macaw is that early access is not until January 2014.

------
wildgift
When Adobe buys them up, will funders get shares of Adobe stock?

~~~
throwmeaway2525
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?

------
mjhea0
$30 came from me!! ha

------
rfnslyr
It'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.

~~~
adamnemecek
Is this opinion this generation's version of "Real men only write code in
(C|assembly|Fortran)"?

~~~
nilliams
Well it's not quite so transparent in its naivete, since a lot of people
_have_ tried and failed to create decent visual editors for HTML & CSS in the
past.

This particular editor does seem a significantly better attempt than previous
efforts though, namely that it seems to be written with a understanding of the
equivalent, idiomatic code.

