19 Jun 2014
Update: Macaw has just launched version 1.5 and these are some of the new features:
States
Being code-savvy. Besides having the requisite user interface with CSS units and responsive breakpoints on a fluid canvas, Macaw claims to be 'the code-savvy design tool'. Production-quality code isn't just a feature of the app, it's arguably what sets it apart from the others. How does it manage to produce clean HTML and CSS? In a word: 'Alchemy'. The trouble is, web design, although it employs elements of graphic design and illustration, does not map to them. If one must compare the web to other media, typography would be a better choice. For a web design, like a typeface, is an environment for someone else’s expression. Stick around and I’ll tell you which site design is like.
Quickly add hover, active and focus states for any element.
Seriously? In
1.5
? This should have been part of 1.0
!Display Toggling
Take control of an element’s display and visibility properties for smart, responsive design.
Once again, a
1.0
feature that was actually demoed in one of their videos but never worked.Rich Text
Create and style nodes for total control of your text.
Yeah, the lack of text options was painful. Also a
1.0
feature.Maybe
1.5
is the new 1.0
?I wrote this in another blog post but decided to give it its own page after downloading the latest version, 1.0.12 and trying to use it once again. I figured, maybe now it’s matured enough where it’s actually useful. I needn’t have bothered, it just hung on me while trying to paste some lorem ipsum text from the internet (I couldn’t remember the way to use the built-in generator). So it seems it’s still useless.
This is by far the worst offender of all the Kickstarter projects I’ve backed.
Macaw was supposed to be the next great thing in web design, it promised to be the Photoshop of web design, the holy grail of web design, a WYSIWYG tool that actually worked, that wrote correct code and respected web standards and that allowed you to create a web site completely in a visual form; no code writing, no fighting with any CSS styles or javascript.It sounded too good to be true. I should have known. When things sound too good to be true they usually are and Macaw is no exception, in fact it’s pretty useless.
That’s a pretty strong word to use for a new piece of software: useless, especially one that the developers have, apparently, worked so hard on. Let me explain.
I was really excited about Macaw, I’ve been making websites on and off for about 17 years, since 1997 more or less when I created my first website with a text editor of some kind. In those 17 years I have not found a really decent WYSIWYG web editor that would actually work as advertised. Back in the old days there was Go Live before Adobe bought it and, like everything Adobe touched after 2001, ruined it, turned it to shit. I can’t remember the name of the company but I bought a copy of this out of my own pocket (the company I was working for wouldn’t pay for it, even though I’d promised to build their website for them which wasn’t even in my job description, cheap bastards) and used it extensively, even to make the website for the cheap bastards I was working for at the time, it was great, not the holy grail of web editors but pretty close. Then, as I say, Adobe bought it and ruined it. So I turned to Macromedia Dreamweaver, once again, before Adobe bought it and, you guessed it, turned it to shit.
By the way, how was it possible for Adobe to buy their only competitor, Macromedia, and then destroy its apps? In a country where monopoly is supposed to be illegal, how was that possible?
Politics aside, Dreamweaver was destroyed by Adobe, they still sell it but it’s an overpriced piece of shit. What’s a web developer to do?
I tried everything else out there, from the Open Source Bluefish, Mozilla, Eclipse, Apatana, etc to the funkier apps like Rapidweaver and even Apple’s short-lived iWeb thing (was it called iWeb? I can’t remember). None of them were satisfactory. So it was with a heavy heart that I went back to coding everything by hand. This is a very tedious, sad and depressing thing to do. Sure you feel all powerful because you have full control of your code, nobody can sully your beautiful code with weird inline styles and other crap, I’m looking at you Dreamweaver, but it is repetitive, grinding work, especially when you have to write a fucking javascript mouseover effect for the 500th time!
So you can imagine how excited I was about Macaw, I gave my $99 bucks to them and waited. At first with bated breath, then with a little resignation.
Finally, version 0.6 was delivered to us Kickstarter backers, oh such joy. It wasn’t bad, it was actually quite impressive. I mean it was very limited and half the stuff that was in there didn’t work, but the promise of it was awesome. It wrote nice code, albeit funky, but nice code. But it wasn’t all unicorns and rainbows, every element had its own styling, which is very heavy handed and a nightmare to maintain or edit, and positioning was either relative or absolute, it was full of bugs and crashed s lot, but hey, it’s a
0.6
version, c’mon what do you expect?Then version 0.7 came out, fixed some stuff, but still every element had its own style, still no real way to share styles between pages, still full of bugs, hmmm… but hey,
0.7
right? Not done yet, don’t be so quick to judge.0.8
fixed more stuff, still every element with its own style, no way to share styles between pages, bugs, uh… Ok, don’t despair, let’s wait for version 1.0
shall we?0.9 changed a bunch of stuff which sounds good, right? 0.9, almost ready for prime time. But it changed things so much that you couldn’t open any of your Macaw projects, you had to recreate them all from scratch! WTF? But hey, that’s what you get for playing around with a non-release software right? They told you it was beta and subject to change so don’t bitch too much.
Alright, so finally version
1.0
comes out and everyone is excited, I get an email saying to upgrade now, of course I’ll upgrade now, what do you think I’ve been waiting all this time for? So I upgrade and… I can’t even access the application. I mean, I’m locked out, can’t use it. WTF? Turns out I have to update my Kickstarter license or some shit but there are no instructions anywhere on how to do it. I send an email to support and after about an hour of uncontrollable rage I give up and go to sleep.Next day I get an email from the Macaw guys saying I should update my license, an email, by the way, that should have been sent before the one about upgrading, right? OK great, I can finally use the program I paid good money for. Click on the link, it says, and your license will be magically updated and everything will be right with the world, I click the link, no dice, I have to fill out a form, OK, fill out the form, it says my license has been updated, super. Go back to the program, nope, your password is incorrect. Shit. Try again, and again, and again. Nothing, no way to get into the fucking program at all. I can’t even get the trial version working for fucks sakes!
So, more emails to Tech Support, no answers, can’t get the damn thing to work. I give up again and go to sleep. Two days later, I get an email from support, nothing they suggest works. Finally at the end of the day we get the thing working. So after all this struggling I can use the software, finally, the coveted
1.0
version, this is going to be awesome.I try to make a website, not even a website, a single web page with 2 links in the top and an image in the middle. Nothing could be simpler than this. It doesn’t work. I create some text next to the right margin, Macaw says it’s
20 pixels
from the top, fine. I copy that text and create the second link right next to it about 30 pixels
to its right. Weirdly, Macaw says this one is -33 pixels
(that’s negative 33 pixels) from the top, what the fuck? The baselines are aligned, how can one be 20 pixels
from the top and the other one be -33 pixels
? But who cares, right? It’s a WYSIWYG, as long at the page looks good, who cares what the code turns out like? Well, I care, I want good code, not shitty code that is later going to come back and bite me in the arse. But right now, to get this far I’ve been fighting with it for about an hour so I don’t care, I just want to be able to create this fucking web page. So I just ignore it and plunge ahead.I add an image to the middle of the page and the rightmost link, the one that was
-33 pixels
from the top jumps out of its container and lands a bunch of pixels below where it used to be and now says its -77 pixels
from the top. I never touched the bastard, was nowhere near it, all I did was add an image to the middle. I move it back up with the mouse and it jumps back down, over and over again. Then I try moving it with the cursor keys, hey, great it stays in its place. Alright. Let me add some text to the bottom of the page. Boom, the fucker jumps down again, bastard!Long story short, after another 40 minutes of fighting with the program I cannot get the link to stay where it needs to, it’s just not possible.
I finally give up on Macaw, once again, and do it all from scratch by hand. It takes me 10 minutes to create that web page by hand-coding everything. It took me almost 2 hours fighting with Macaw and I was not able to make it work. Oh, and did I mention that version
1.0
doesn’t even have a manual of any type? All it has are some videos on the Macaw website, most of which apply to pre 1.0
versions where things were quite different so are not much use.So, yeah, overall not great. I wouldn’t say it’s disappointing, I’d say it’s useless. If I can’t use the program to create a simple website then guess what? It’s useless.
Maybe in another year it will be somewhat useful, for now it’s a waste of time and money. Audio playr 2 1 1.
Share this post if you want,or follow me on Twitter if you're into that stuff.Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.comments powered by Disqus
Related Posts
Macaw is a code-savvy web design tool that offers “the same flexibility as your favorite image editor, but also writes semantic HTML and remarkably succinct CSS.” I spoke with co-founder Adam Christ to learn more about how Macaw allows designers to create beautiful web experiences without writing code.
In a sentence, how would you describe Macaw?
Macaw is a web design tool that let’s you draw remarkably clean HTML and CSS.
Can you share some about your individual backgrounds and what inspired the initial idea of Macaw?
Both Tom (Giannattasio) and I have multiple years of web design and development experience.
Tom has done design work for a well known DC based design agency called NCLUD, Twitter and MIT. Over the course of his career he has been able to work with clients like Oracle, Apple and National Geographic.
I have been primarily a developer focused on everything from front end development using HTML, CSS and Javascript to backend development SQL and PHP. Room arranger 8 4 0 545 download free. I have spent a part of my career doing web development in the hospitality industry but most of it was spent working for a Noblis a non-profit organization. I worked on multiple projects for the General Services Administration.
Macaw 1 5 10 – Code Savvy Web Design Tool Download
Tom and I met a few years ago while working at Sabre Hospitality Solutions. Tom was on the design team and I was on the backend team, writing PHP and managing databases. After Sabre, Tom and I went our separate ways. Tom spent time working for NCLUD, a great DC-based design agency and he was later acqui-hired by Twitter, and then went on to work at MIT. I stayed in the DC area and went on to do web design and development work for Noblis. All while this was happening Tom and I stayed friends and worked a side project or two along the way. It wasn’t until Tom was working at MIT up in Boston that he came up with the idea for Macaw from his own needs as a web designer/developer. Shortly after Tom started experimenting with his idea I went up to Boston and visited him. He showed me what he was working on and asked me if I wanted to help out with what was at the time the very early stages of what would become Macaw. From there Tom and I moonlighted on the project for a couple months. In January 2013 Tom decided to quit his job at MIT and devote 100% of his time to Macaw. I continued to work nights and weekends for some time but then joined him full-time in May. In October 2013 we ran a successful Kickstarter campaign which substantially exceeded our goals and ultimately allowed us to hire Brandon Jones who specializes in native Mac application development. Shortly after that we were able to hire Danny Kleinman to work on the Windows application.
How do you think people will use Macaw?
People will use Macaw for everything: basic wireframes, prototyping, full on website designs. The nice thing about Macaw is that it is flexible and it allows users to create what they need incredibly fast.
What was the design process like for creating the product?
Macaw is influenced by both our personal experiences and the web design community. We have designed Macaw using a mixture of both our inherent knowledge of the headaches that come along with designing for the web along with feedback from the community.
How does Macaw differ from other tools in this space?
Macaw differs mostly in two ways. The first is it’s layout engine, Stream. Typically with other web design tools, creating and manipulating the position of elements in your design is a very frustrating process. They usually allow you to drag elements from a toolbox and place them on a canvas and once placed they get “snapped” into place based on how they best fit into the document structure. Again this can be very tedious and annoying since the user doesn’t always feel like they have final say or input as to where the element is placed.Macaw improves this experience by allowing you to draw elements wherever you want and move them freely on the page. Once you have placed an element, Macaw’s layout engine Stream will analyze where that element is and how it relates to other elements in your document and then writes the necessary CSS to position that element exactly where it was placed. We feel like this flow is much more in line with how designers are used to working in other more traditional design tools such as Photoshop.
The second way Macaw differs is the quality of the code it exports from your designs. Many other tools produce garbage code that most developers would rather throw out than use. This is typically because they don’t write the code in a way that takes into account the best practices and techniques that have been developed over the years. The generated code from these other tools typically adds unneeded markup to the HTML, creates oddly named CSS classes, and none of the CSS is consolidated. Macaw addresses this issue with our design to code engine, Alchemy. The engine uses a sophisticated algorithm to analyze your design to write the most efficient and succinct code possible. The outputted HTML markup is clean with only the elements you created, the CSS consolidated where it can be and all CSS classes make sense.
How have you tested Macaw with users? How have you iterated on feedback?
To test Macaw we ran a four month beta, which was made up of our Kickstarter backers. During the beta we received a huge amount of feedback and we stuck to pushing out updates on a weekly basis. The feedback we received helped us to greatly improve the tool. It also led us completely to rewrite our layout engine to improve the experience within the tool.
What additional features do you think might be incorporated into a future version?
We are still heavily focused on version one of Macaw. We still have some important features that we want to get into the tool including states (hover, active, etc.), rich text editing and a few other features I can’t quite talk about yet.
How has Macaw been received so far?
Macaw 1 5 10 – Code Savvy Web Design Tools
We have received an overall great response from the community thus far. A lot of users are really liking the tool and seeing the benefits of using it.