‘Tis the season for design-friendly web tools, with Google making a free Web Designer app and Hype 2 making it simpler than ever to create beautiful HTML5 animations. But several weeks ago, a preview of an app caught my eye with its attempts to make normal web design simple for anyone with an eye for design: Macaw.
Advertised as an app with the flexibility of an image editor but designed for making clean CSS and HTML code, Macaw looks like the web design tool we’ve all been waiting for. It’s the simplicity that tools like Frontpage advertised years ago, but with the clean, modern code that otherwise would take hours in a text editor. Pulling off such an auditions project, though, isn’t so simple, which is why they started a Kickstarter campaign yesterday to fund their efforts to make Macaw and bring it to the Mac and PC.
Macaw is designed around graphical design, and built for today’s responsive web. You’ll build sites on a fluid canvas automatically, and Macaw will make sure everything works for you automatically. It’ll let you reuse elements across your design — like layers in Photoshop — and changes in one element will replicate across the other copies of that element in your design. It’ll then turn your design idea into clean code that’s easy to edit, and even give you a style guide for your site based on your design.
Apparently we’re not the only ones who wanted a simple way to design beautiful websites like this, because the project has raised just shy of $500 less than their Kickstarter goal of $75k in just one day of fundraising. That means Macaw will almost definitely be made, and we can’t wait to try it out.
For now, though, if you want a part in building Macaw, go check out their Kickstarter campaign where you can make sure you’ll get an early copy of Macaw with a $99 backing, or some other project swag with smaller (or larger) amounts.
Macaw is going after the same market that Adobe Muse is designed for, but we’re sure hoping their team can do even better than Adobe’s Muse. It’ll be exciting to see — hopefully by January ’14!
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