Google Web Designer | Hacker News Reader

Google Web Designer

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1,126 pointsjaysonlane442 comments

This appears to be a fork of the Ninja Authoring Tool which was made by Motorola Mobility over a year ago as part of the Montage project. Now Google owns Motorola Mobility.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/07/ninja-...

Historical context, thanks!

The most important feature of this (to Google(?)) is the built-in ad editor.

It's the last point on the feature list page, but it's very telling that it's the first thing on the "Create New" screen.

https://support.google.com/webdesigner/answer/3261498?hl=en&...

I think that makes sense -- a lot of Google's (paying) clients have been using Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash to make ads for years; if Google wants them to adopt HTML5 technology they need to make tools that are as easy to use as Flash was.

That's the purpose of my startup :); we've been making an HTML5 animation tool for OS X for the last two years:

http://tumult.com/hype/

How do you feel about having Google as a direct competitor?

Google itself doesn't scare me; it is really just team vs. team. I think we've got the best product and engineering expertise for this market. Clearly I'm biased :) so I'd encourage anyone to try Tumult Hype and let us know your thoughts (we've got a fully functional 14-day trial on the site).

While Google hasn't announced pricing, it is probably safe to say it is going to be free. This is a business for us, so we charge $29.99. I don't like competing against free, but that just means we'll be continually pushed to provide that much more value!

They're the perfect competitor - they validate the market, they almost always fail, and they acquire winners.

Maybe an acquisition is in their near future.

Your App is also mentioned a lot in the world of InDesign users looking to create interactive e-books. The HTML5 import of InDesign works well Hype. Hype was mentioned just last week at the Adobe User Event I helped set up. These people are designers, not programmers and your App can really help them. #eyeopener

Hype is amazing tool - only took a few minutes to get up to speed on it. We built an educational touchscreen kiosk in it, and then were able to deploy on an iPad by just scaling it down and downsampling the bitmap assets. A really polished tool.

I nabbed Hype 2 off the mac app store only a few weeks ago or so. I haven't had much time behind it but it seems promising. I'll have to compare the two utilities....

Adobe has Edge Animate for that and Adobe Flash can export to HTML5 as well.

http://html.adobe.com/edge/animate/

Given Adobe track record on betrayal, and borderline extorsion schemes , I would not even touch their tools anymore. They had they chance with Flash,Dreamweaver and Fireworks...

Flash = almost dead

Dreamweaver = Zombie mod

Fireworks = Dead despite its powerfull features like jquerymobile skinning,project files as png files,games graphics, native app design, easily customizable through js.

Thank you Elop (who sold MM to Adobe ), thank you Adobe.

As a former Flash Developer, I will never put my time and money into learning Adobe software again.

No offence but I still make 5 figures using Flash/Flex/AIR for Fortune 100 companies.

Flex with IntelliJ beats the javascript crap sauce anyone tries to push down my throat. The VM is extremely capable (yet terrible advertised and documented) and the language is superb and easily approachable.

If Adobe wasn't such a butt hole* at PR, we'd be in a different situation.

*:understand that Adobe shot itself in the foot in every possible way in the last 3 years.

As if Google had such a clean slate ... please ...

>>>> Fireworks = Dead despite its powerfull features like jquerymobile skinning,project files as png files,games graphics, native app design, easily customizable through js.

Agreed. I started doing a lot of projects in Fireworks because of how powerful and flexible it is. I actually stopped using Illustrator and Photoshop and was using Fireworks exclusively. I was really pissed when they killed it after the Creative Cloud.

Money grubbing scum.

I never thought flash was all that easy to use. I could never get the timeline to cooperate with what I was trying to do (drag/copy/paste frames etc)

Hi,

You can create animations in Google Web Designer in two modes, Quick mode and Advanced mode.

In Quick mode, you build your animation scene by scene: you add a new view of the entire page, change the elements you want to animate, and, optionally, modify your transition times and easings.

For more complex animation, Advanced mode lets you individually animate each of the the elements, optionally modifying transition times and easing as well. Advanced mode also shows layers, which let you change where each element is in the stack of elements.

Check out more information on how to use the two different timeline modes in our help center: https://support.google.com/webdesigner/topic/3181123?hl=en&r...

Thanks, Google Web Designer team

the first two links on that help center page result in 404s: "In Quick mode, you ..." (https://support.google.com/webdesigner/topic/3227054) and "... animation, Advanced mode lets ..." (https://support.google.com/webdesigner/topic/3228643)

The Flash timeline was counterintuitive but once you grokked it, it was super easy and super efficient. I came to Flash from After Effects (much more intuitive keyframing) and hated Flash until my brain clicked with it.

the flash timeline has poor visual cues on it as to what was going on. key frames area easy enough to get. but sometimes the timeline ends in a dash pattern, then there's the multiple open and closed ends on one timeline. All in all there are just too many states. Live motion was a good tool that just never got out of a buggy state but had an easier timeline to work in.

It is not the problem with people creating the ads that they don't want to create HTML5 banners. The problem lies with most media buying agencies that won't accept them for reasons like their system is not ready to handle this (HTML5) yet or the most heard reason that they want Flash banners even with old versions of Action Script because they seem harder to block by ad-blockers and thus think that more people will watch them. They forget the fact that most people are annoyed with them also ;-)

If you create a truly brilliant ad which is targeted to the right audience and let them do something with your brand inside the ad for example people are more willing to view them in my opinion in stead of just forcing them the same old banner over and over again only with a different brand in them..

>because they seem harder to block by ad-blockers and thus think that more people will watch them.

Do companies actually believe this? Flash is the easiest to remove of all ads.

  "If you create a truly brilliant ad which is targeted to 
   the right audience and let them do something with your 
   brand inside the ad for example people are more willing 
   to view them in my opinion in stead of just forcing them 
   the same old banner over and over again only with a 
   different brand in them."

I have a lot of sympathy for the outreach companies trying to make advertising agencies behave. At some point, someone's neurons started firing and realized consumers had taken control over how they view media. Someone realized that eventually advertisements were going to be viewed of the users volition. Which meant they no longer could be deceitful, obnoxious, baiting, terrible, and rude. Or at least not transparently so.

Unfortunately the industry was built on the grounds that the users had no choice, so the notion of good advertising I think will never come. Old men in stuffy suits don't change unless they go bankrupt.

While Ads is an important focus area for Web Designer, we don't see it as an 'Ads only' tool.

Our ambition while building Google Web Designer is that it be a general-purpose, awesome HTML5 content builder.

Hence the name Web Designer & not Ad Designer.

We aim to learn from our users, iterate & push quickly to reach our ultimate goal of being a kick- general purpose HTML5 builder!

The ad-centric intent is clear and trying to cover it with "we don't see it this way" only further alienates potential users (and worse, makes fool of them). Be up front and honest about the product you make.

When I create a new "document" the first field is about which ad platform I want to use... For calling the product "Web designer", that sends a message...

Great work, I really appreciate it and find value in it, but I think you have to be more clear about this "focus area" in the landing page.

Thanks for the comment. Just out of curiosity, what does "iterate & push quickly" mean in your context? Some people use that to mean releasing every few hours; some every few months. What release frequency are you aiming for?

It's definitely an ad tool. The help section is entirely about making ads. If you look closely, the responsive layout is strictly for the ad, not the website.

You say it like an accusation. Google's the biggest company in the ad business.

The introduction is misleading, it is an accusation. A valid one.

Apple has a somewhat similar tool called iAd Producer.https://developer.apple.com/iad/iadproducer/ (I believe you might need the free developer account to view the page, however.) I know you can create iBooks Author widgets and other HTML5 components that aren't necessarily ads. Even if Google's goal is the same as Apple's (i.e. creating advertisements), I think that Google's branding makes their tool a bit more interesting for someone not expressly interested in creating ads.

Flash was not designed to create whole websites either but that didn't stop people from doing it anyway.

Same can be said about HTML and applications.

HTML? How else was website building intended to be?

"HTML and Applications"

I'd agree that it was not the original goal of HTML to develop full applications.

To be an hyperlinked documents, nothing else.

Might as well be called "Google Ad Designer" :)

There seem to be a hidden agenda in everything Google does these days.

It's not hidden that Google makes its money through advertising.

Nor is it hidden that most ads served through Google's networks are frequently badly designed or use bloated Flash.

Agree. The name should not give false illusions about the product. "Google Ad Designer" sounds better along with Google AdWords

I see it first and foremost as an Adwords/Adsense add-on. More interactive ads = more clicks = more money.

Yes, this looks as a perfect tool for ads — esp to create more appealing, eye-catching effects.

But its Branded as Google Web Designer. :)

Yeah, the product positioning here is awful; it's like someone just went through the marketing copy at the last minute to strip out its ad-centricity. My very cynical guess is that it went like this:

#1 Wait, couldn't the ad designer you've been working so hard on actually be used by anyone to just make web pages?

#2 Well...I mean I guess so, but it wouldn't--

#1 Awesome! It's really a Google Web Designer! This can be a much bigger PR splash than just a nice tool for making ads! Gotta think outside the box. Generalize.

#2 OK, but the actual goal here is to make it easier to create ads, and the product's completely designed around--

#1 BAM! Name changed! Two minutes to create a whole new product. That MBA has paid for itself in spades!

I think that's the charitable view.

More likely:

#1 "we need an ad builder tool"

#2 "OK, but it can do more than ads..."

#1 "Good one. Then it it will seem like we're giving back."

#2 "?"

#1 "Don't worry. Just make sure the focus of using the app will be ads. That will help our users the most, and provide the biggest impact with our limited resources."

I know what you're saying, but "appealing" and "eye catching" effects are generally mutually exclusive (to the user that isn't interested in the ads, but the content...).

Yes, they are.

One of the other purposes of Advertisements are also to create impressions and Branding. You don't have to necessarily click every ad. :)

And with such visual tools ad making is very easy and reachable to all. A great project by Google. Kudos. With Visual tools like this we can interact with more depth. And lets not forget this is free too.

They might bring better ad-making experience overtime with built in ad-templates. All this will bring more Appealing ads.

And Eye catching ads serve as — Branding and Brand-remembering for Publishers, users notice them and remember(clicks not important in Branding)

Downloaded. Opened. Drew a rectangle. Filled with #FF0000.

It spit this out:

https://gist.github.com/JacksonGariety/6766626

(after struggling and realizing CMD+S wasn't saving my file)

I feel sorry for whoever was tasked with making this application.

Hi,

We are glad you are trying out GWD. You are correct that it seems like a bit of overhead just to render a simple rectangle. However, as alphakappa astutely observed, there is some overhead to parse the JSON data which describes the various shapes and to render those shapes in canvas(es).

What you see is the entire canvas rendering library used by GWD. That code will be reused for additional shapes you create, including more complex shapes you can create with the Pen tool.

You bring up a great point though. In most cases, you probably don't need to draw shapes (and the overhead that comes with the runtime). If you want to rectangle elements on stage, a much better option is to use the Tag tool (the fourth tool from the top) and add HTML elements such as DIV and give them background colors and modify the border styles using the Properties panel.

We are working on our help documentation to educate our users in how to optimize their content in both size and performance.

Thanks, Google Web Designer team - aka the ones tasked with making this application. ;o)

I understand you guys want to serialize data efficiently. But perhaps you can pretty print the rectangle information? It would make designs a lot nicer when version controlled (esp so if you sort the content consistently). Also, it would make manually meddling easier.

I'm curious, why not...

#rectangle { width: 200px; height: 150px; background #FF0000; }

...by default?

Hi,

Great observation! We have had this discussion internally as well.

For now, we wanted to have a clear separation in the types of content the user is creating on a canvas, since canvas enables different types of content. And, in some cases, there isn't a 1-1 fallback between a canvas shape definition and an HTML element, e.g., an oval with inner radius.

However, we realize that in a lot of cases users just want elements that look like rectangles, and a DIV with certain styles will suffice. We will work to direct users towards that workflow in such cases.

Thanks, Google Web Designer team

Because you used the "shape" tool and not the "tag" tool.

Can you make the lib used to render the animation and the drawings opensource so developpers can understand it more easily and "hack" it when the designer goes overboard? thanks.

Regards Mparaiso.

The amount of code it generates for a page containing just a rectangle is not a good way to judge the tool. They may have some finite overhead because of the expectation that most users will be using the tool to create more complex pages. If the tool is good for the average ad-page that's created, while maintaining cross-browser compatibility, and bad for extremely simple pages, then who is to judge?

I agree. The big(gish) script they injected is just fixed overhead, as is the CSS for positioning the canvas. It's just stuff we're used to having in separate files. The actual non-boilerplate part is this:

{\"type\":1,\"xoff\":0,\"yoff\":-1.4210854715202004e-14,\"strokeWidth\":1,\"strokeColor\":[0,0,0,1],\"fillColor\":[1,0,0,1],\"tlRadius\":0,\"trRadius\":0,\"blRadius\":0,\"brRadius\":0,\"width\":201,\"height\":104.00000000000003,\"strokeStyle\":\"Solid\",\"strokeMat\":null,\"fillMat\":null}

That could be better, to be sure. It's for some reason part of a JSON-encoded string inside a JS object instead of just a JS object (hence the hard-to-read escaped quotes). And the properties could use defaults to spare us "strokeMat: null" and such. But it's not horrible.

Edits: numerous and minor

Please edit; stretches the page on 1366 width.

arg, too late for me to do it

It would help to see the following.

Draw one rectangle. Save as rect1.

Draw a second rectangle. Save as rect2.

Show us the diff between rect1 and rect2.

Despite the poorly chosen name, this is a WYSIWYG tool for animation, not a site design tool. If all you care about is markup, use a text editor and make your animations by hand. Compared with Adobe Edge Animate (which is very similar), the markup is actually very clean (aside from the big script block, which is for ad functionality and also animation / drawing routines). You can see the animations defined as real keyframes in CSS, not overly reliant on javascript, which is good. It means there is a chance of taking those and using them independently of the JS runtime code, and also that execution will take advantage of native browser animation functions, rather than being bottlenecked by JS code.

It would be nice if there was some options for stripping out the Ad specific javascript. But even at ~55k this is a pretty slimmed down codebase considering what it does. Swiffy, which converts flash files to HTML/javascript has a 200k JS runtime.

A tool that designers can use to make animations in HTML5/CSS3 is desperately needed if we are ever going to move to a truly post-Flash world. We can't expect everyone to be an HTML developer, and achieving the same level of complexity and polish is extremely difficult when just working with code.

From File > New if you select a blank HTML file, you get an empty HTML file with no Ad specific JavaScript.

Thanks, I thought I tried that. That does reduce the extra code quite a bit.

All I see are data for the location and size of the rectangle and some extra code added by default to allow their scripts to work.

I thought it's a tool for designing websites - nope.

It isn't -- it's a tool for designing ads.

Calling it "Google Web Designer" was a terrible decision, but that's clearly not what the tool was meant for.

Ad development is the last listed feature, if that is the main purpose of the app then their website is very misleading.

I agree it's very misleading but they do clarify it in the first sentence of the help page.

Google Web Designer is an advanced web application that's built with HTML5 which lets you design and build HTML5 advertisements and other web content using an integrated visual and code interface

Uh-oh. So, while Frontpage just broke useragent stylesheets (all those sites setting the text-color, and assuming background was white, like it was in IE) -- this'll break what's left of the semantic web? I wonder how well google handles crawling these things...

The semantic web in the way that this tool breaks it has been dead since we had table-based layouts and div-hell further buried that notion. However, that doesn't mean that the semantic web is dead. I somewhat agree with Alan Kay when he said the web was built by amateurs [0]. The problem with the original design is that only documents were considered, when there are actually two citizens: documents and the apps used to display those documents for different contexts and usages. The original design only considered documents in one static use case, a desktop browser. There are two levels of semantics: document semantics, which the web got right and that xhtml 2.0 might have made even richer, and app semantics that were completely ignored by the semantic web crowd to the point where the app people hijacked the plans of those pushing semantic documents.

HTML5 Twitter isn't a document. The 1 to 1 correspondence between the window object and the document object is all wrong. There should have been a 1 to 1 or 1 to many relationship between window and documents. When there is a 1 to many relationship the window object reflects only the semantics of apps and within it, there should be many documents, one for each tweet displayed by the HTML5 twitter app.

[0] http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-wit...

Google has long been able to crawl pure javascript pages - I actually think their their crawler is just headless Chrome.

It's meant as an ad development tool, not a page development tool. Entirely different audience.

...which is why they should call it Google Ad Designer.

I don't disagree with you at all there. The name is terrible.

Google Web Designer 2013 = Microsoft Frontpage 2000?

I think its more like Microsoft Expression Design. It even looks similar.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=3618...

That's exactly what popped to mind immediately. Maybe it was that hairball of code combined with the "generator" meta tag.

Dreamweaver comes to mind.

This reminds me of the MS Word generating HTML

Not really. MS Word was designed to generate HTML that would look like your original MS Word document and be round-tripped. This is not particularly easy. However, it made sense if you wanted to use your word processor to create and edit web documents (rather than find and learn another program), or publish existing documents as web pages. Which some businesses did.

This did actually make the world a better place insofar as the web got some HTML pages that would otherwise have been Word doc file downloads.

MS Word also produces much smaller HTML pages if you save your web page as "filtered HTML", sacrificing some Word functionality in the process. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/about-using-filt...

However, to do that, you would have to know the "filtered" option was there, and why you might want to use it. Which is probably not your average office drone.

I lost count of how many times I had to open a Word generated HTML document (by a regular Word user that though copying from Word and posting it in the CMS was a good idea) and clean it up by hand so it wouldn't break the page for browsers other than IE (even in IE it would break sometimes... surprise, surprise).

So yes, Sir. Yes, really.

HTML generators like this (or MS Word, or Dreamweaver, you name it) unfortunately are not optimized to do just the job they are used for. A good example for that is the one gave by our fellow commenter above. It adds a lot of useless code because it is simpler to do it that way. In the times where every Kb/s used to count, load a HTML page with 3 times the size it should be was a real issue.

Also, MS Word to HTML was the worst thing I have ever seen in terms of compatibility for other browsers. That to me does not sound like making the world a better place, sorry.

Smells like FrontPage spirit.

My favorite part is the WebKit specific code... Don't be Evil and something about standards right?

This is like IE4/Netscape Communicator days all over again, except now with more than two dominant browsers...

"I was a web dev in the 90s and all I got was this lousy XMLHttpRequest object"

Hi,

While editing a file, Google Web Designer uses -webkit prefixes. However, when you publish your content, the publish dialog allows you to specify additional vendor prefixes (or no prefixes) in the output so the content works in different browsers.

I hope this helps.

Thanks, Nivesh (Google Web Developer)

Can you explain the reasons behind this behavior?

Are you saying:

1. This tool can't produce cross-browser output

2. This tool includes some rendering engine-specific markup to solve cross-platform issues.

1 is unlikely and 2 is benign.

Thought so too, but when you publish they let you add FireFox / IE CSS prefixes (on by default)

> My favorite part is the WebKit specific code... Don't be Evil and something about standards right?

Meaning what? Google isn't directly involved with WebKit anymore and can't make them implement standards.

Google and Apple are the reason we are back to this mess again. They need to fix the problem not facilitate it with tools like this.

Microsoft and FrontPage did the exact same thing back in the days.

Hah! I did exactly the same, went to code view and closed the application. x-D

Github login wall.

Who cares about what you think? Give some constructive criticism or shut up.

Do you know how much code this is for a runtime and how many browser incompatibility issues this solves.

> Who cares about what you think?

He probably does, to begin with. That you might disagree with him about how much code is warranted here does not make his comment unconstructive.

> I feel sorry for whoever was tasked with making this application.

That sounds just condescending to me.

What is the problem with a < 4kb runtime and some browser hacks?

Pretty sure that he was being constructive. Did you look at the code?

I care, else I wouldn't be reading these comments.

Ok, the war is on. Does anyone know of a good HTML5 ad blocker?

Flash was awesome. It made it really easy to block animated ads. My browsing experience had been wonderful ever since I installed a Flash blocker a few years ago. Also did wonders for my battery life.

Please, please help my browsing experience remain wonderful. Thanks.

Or you could stop using a website you don't think does ads correctly.

You don't know if a site contains ads until you visit it, and by then, they've already passed off your information to their Ad network partners and exposed you to the risk of Ad network malware.

The safe thing to do is to block Ads by default. And only disable them when they've shown that they're not just letting mass third party Ad networks embed arbitrary script in their page whilst harvesting your private information.

The safe/private thing to do is not visit any website at all. Ads don't have special access to your computer that a normal website does not. By visiting a new website, ads are by far the least of your worries.

Being online at all exposes you to risk and creates a footprint of your existence. Much like moving around in public does. And just as in moving around in public, the safest and most private thing to do is to not be in public at all.

Well then. I suppose you are also opposed to

* pop-up blocking

* cookie blocking

* readability

..all of which are common browser features now. Because you can just not visit bad sites.

Yeah, didn't think so.

The only relevant thing you've mentioned in your list is pop-up blocking, which is a subset of advertising (cookie blocking doesn't prevent impression and click tracking, and Readability has nothing to do with ad blocking, as the most common use case for Readability is after you've visited a page already).

Blocking one form of advert is not even slightly the same as blocking all forms of adverts.

There is an implicit social contract created when a content distributor attempts to monetize the content - you can only obtain the content if you go through the monetization strategy. Sometimes that's a price on the content, other times that's an advert.

Circumventing the monetization strategy is a statement that you believe you're entitled to the content without paying for it. Almost universally, you're not, and this entitlement complex is pervasive through Internet users. TV shows, movies, music, software, anything that's been given artificial scarcity is a target for this entitlement attitude.

For some content, this attitude doesn't hurt the content producer enough to be meaningful, or the content producer has adapted. This is almost universally the most valuable and previously established content producers. Your large game studios, your record labels, etc. For other content producers, however, those who aren't as well established, the harm is more severe. The independent web comic, the unsigned band, the budding writer, the local newspaper. These people suffer because Internet users think they deserve the content these people create without providing compensation, and subsequently, less content gets made, talent can't be developed, gifted individuals can't specialize, and the world is a less beautiful place.

So sure, we can continue to use ad blockers, but at what cost? It's not hurting U2, and it's not hurting J.K. Rowling, but it's hurting other people, people who feel the kinds of pain a 1.5% vs. a 2.5% CTR might bring.

I don't think that's completely fair. The people who are providing the content on a lot of web pages are not the same people who are responsible for the monetization scheme. Some sites have good/decent content, but really obtrusive advertisements that the authors aren't responsible for.

The people providing the content are still being supported by the monetization scheme - you're taking money from them when you use their content without viewing their ads.

So what? 99 times out of 100, the people monetizing the site are also the ones who pay the bills.

You aren't entitled to content just because it's good.

So, a website provides content to you without a membership free at the "cost" of also having ads on the page. Which you may or may not choose to ignore.

Your response to this is circumventing the ads and blocking them, denying the service which you use any revenue from you. Awesome.

How about if a site has intrusive over/under ads or otherwise intrusive behavior, you just don't visit it? And allow the sites you use that do ads without being jerks about it to actually continue to function and provide the service that you apparently value?

EDIT:

I'm not normally someone who crusades against ad blocking software, but your comment was extremely obnoxious and really annoyed me.

It's going to be trickier as just blocking a single plugin is no longer viable.

I think an domain blacklist a la Adblock is probably the best idea but that won't help you with ads that are already present in the DOM on pageload.

Thankfully, AdBlock and friends can also target DOM elements for hiding or outright elimination.

Why do we even waste time detectin and hiding ads? WHy can't we not wasting bandwidth download it at all?

Doesn't Adblock Plus alter the structure of the page, which can mess up layout?

Also believe it or not I don't want to block all ads, just animated ones. I want a general solution for All People, not just us nerds, and erasing advertising from the web would destroy a lot of businesses.

I want something browser makers can build in and turn on by default, which is what Safari has essentially done now with Mavericks (Flash and Java are blocked by default.. Flash under the rubric of power conservation).

Maybe a crowd sourced blocker would be ideal for identifying divs in a site.

It would be a plugin that allows you to mark a spot on a page that is an ad and the plugin will record the very specific CSS path and hide it permanently for you and others that go to visit that site.

Maybe once you have a significant number of CSS paths you could do something with machine learning to identify the likeliness of a div containing an ad and block it when it crosses a certain degree of confidence.

Firefox+NoScript does a pretty good job. Typically, the domains that host the JavaScript to run the ads have no JavaScript I actually want executed.

If there's an exceptional case I open it in a Chromium private browsing window.

NoScript blocks all javascript except for a whitelist you have to construct. That's way too disruptive as a general solution. We need something easy and automatic.

    NoScript blocks all javascript except for a whitelist you have to construct.

Blocking JavaScript is just one of NoScript's many features. (NoScript's other features include blocking plugins and other embeddings (e.g., HTML5 video and audio), as well as protecting against XSS, CSRFs, and clickjacking.) I use NoScript, but I don't use it to block JavaScript. NoScript's ability to block HTML5 video and audio is one of my favorite features, and I hope that NoScript will block additional HTML5 annoyances in the future, especially as advertisers and other troublemakers make greater use of HTML5.

I am quite happy with Ghostery+NoScript. If you have a general solution, then you would just end up with an arms race. See [0] for details.

[0] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/12/its-made...

> We need something easy and automatic.

Like running ads in a standalone plugin which could be easily disabled. Wait...

such entitlement! do you have any idea how publishers make money on the web?

Entitlement? He is entitled to not download and view content that he doesn't want to.

No one is obligated to alter their own behavior in order to sustain someone else's business model. How publishers make money is their problem to solve, and if they're publishing content on the open web that's viewable with web browsers, then it's up to them to decide how to deal with the fact that some web browsers aren't going to download the ads.

They have plenty of alternative options: they can block all of the content unless ads are downloaded; they can put all of the content behind a paywall, etc. But most websites don't employ these methods, and do leave their content accessible to people who block ads.

No one is obligated to alter their own behaviour in order to sustain someone else's business model, that's why it's totally okay to shoplift if it's more agreeable and convenient to you.

Sorry, I wasn't clear enough.. I don't actually want to block all ads, just animated ads. Because they are annoying and drain battery life.

I just want an HTML5 version of a Flash blocker.

It is impossible to read and understand text when there is something moving in the corner of your eye. The human brain was trained to do that for millions of years of evolution on the savannah. The moving thing might be a predator...

I'm sorry, but what's so wrong with not wanting to have advertisements on your browser?

People make their money via ads? Sure, why not. Do I always have to see those ads, and just sigh and "suck it up", even though it's potentially ruining my browsing experience? I don't think so.

> I'm sorry, but what's so wrong with not wanting to have advertisements on your browser?

Would you pay a monthly fee to all the websites that provide you content in exchange for an ad free experience?

Do you have a minimum amount of time you promise to yourself to spend gazing at ads in print publications too, to give the publishers what you owe them as a consumer?

By providing valuable, interesting content, maybe? http://theoatmeal.com/comics/facebook_likes

Those are Facebook likes while the conversation is about ads on websites.

And in the end, he says that interesting content will get you "Likes," where in the current conversation of blocking ads does the visitor contribute after perusing the valuable and interesting content?

Not at all. It's only entitlement if the publisher also provides me a way to pay them for the content (at the same rate that the advertiser is paying) and I still choose not to pay for the content.

I want to be the customer, not the product being sold.

I'm curious whether or not an embedded Esprima AST parser would provide a decent API for writing rules that detect undesirable code and rewrites them as no-ops.

It would be nice if this was also a social version of user scripts where I could visit all the user scripts that other users wrote that work on the page I am currently on. A button in the browser that takes me to all the user scripts that match the URL pattern for that page would be awesome.

Element Hiding Helper lets you target page components based on source. It has a standard filter for ads and other filters for egregious social buttons/trackers.

I also use it to remove annoying sign-up overlays and Google+ notifications when I search.

And if you add Stylish on top you can pretty much make webpages look like you want them to with 2m work - I often end up fixing huge ugly headers and the like (i.e. text size/color) on blogs I frequent!

THis takes care of half of the problem - seeing the ads.

It does not, unfortunately, prevent the ads from seeing you. (Very nearly literally these days.)

If they're embedded iframes, you should still be able to use e.g. adblock based on the URL. If not, you can probably go back to element blocking, same as now for static containers. If they're invisible / removed from the DOM tree, it should be a lighter weight browsing experience :)

My best suggestion is Adblock Plus combined with Element Hiding Helper in Firefox. Gives you a menu item that lets you select an element to hide, with a custom CSS selector. If you can find it with jQuery, you can probably hide it with that.

I choose to disable adblock on all sites, and only block ads on websites I feel are not legit or are going overboard with the ads.

I choose to let sites do what they want with ads, since it is their site and their business plan/model. I also choose not to visit sites that have ads that I don't like.

This is exactly what I do as well and it drives me nuts that it's not the default normal way that adblockers work.

Do you also use a "@@*$document,domain=~foo.com|~bar.com" filter in order to accomplish it?

Interesting that this is being released as a native app, rather than a web app.

It uses Chromium Embedded and a fairly custom UI, so it looks like it's all HTML anyway. Maybe they packed it up as an app to get better FS permissions (amoungst other things).

i was surprised by this as well since google has moved away from desktop apps to web apps with a few exceptions.

If Chrome is the host Google will be perfectly happy to move back to desktop apps with a cloud storage back end. It's easier to corral users that way.

Think this is mostly an alternative for Flash in display ads (which still primarily use Flash for animation). Guess is based on it being announced through Doubleclick's twitter stream.

https://twitter.com/doubleclick_pub/status/38471531196005171...

It certainly looks that way. The name seems like a bit of an overreach though - "Designing the web" = creating animated ad banners?

Correct. In the "Create New File" dialog, all of the default options are for Google ad units: http://cl.ly/image/2V0n2W1i041v

I tried to open an existing html file and got:

"Unable to open file due to the following error: The file was not created in Google Web Designer."

So, basically, Google is just creating their own proprietary format that's built on HTML. Even if you are just using it to construct ads you'll be somewhat locked-in to this toolchain. Since HTML is inherently open people will be able to build converters but it's still a bad precedent.

Hi, Currently we do only support editing document created in GWD, but we are outputting HTML, CSS and JS. We only add some author time data in order to enhance the authoring experience but otherwise everything else is just plain HTML and CSS. Our minified JS is only added for the Ads use case and to support the rendering of Canvas shapes.

Also we are still in Beta and we are working on adding many more features for our 1.0 release. Feel free to submit any features request through our public forums.

Thanks, Google Web Designer team.

>So, basically, Google is just creating their own proprietary format that's built on HTML. Even if you are just using it to construct ads you'll be somewhat locked-in to this toolchain. Since HTML is inherently open people will be able to build converters but it's still a bad precedent.

Adobe's Muse does a similar thing - if you publish to Business Catalyst using it it locks you into a proprietary "format" that forces you to stay on the platform and edit the site through Muse, or else it no longer 'compiles.'

Not sure where you got that info. Muse generates standards based HTML and CSS, you can take the HTML and CSS files and do what ever you want with them. Note, at that point your editing code, not visually designing. Even if you've published to Business Catalyst, you can just take your file and export to HTML and CSS later on.

I'm willing to push past my visceral dislike of WYSIWIG editors to try it out again. I need to get a Cloud account sooner or later.

As a replacement for open web frameworks perhaps it's a regression, but as a replacement for Flash I'd say it's a step forward.

Because of this it's worthless to me as is, a complete non-starter. What a ridiculous requirement, if I want to use this "web designer" I am supposed to rewrite or abandon all my previous work. Good luck getting anyone to use this.

It serves a specific purpose, the same as Adobe Edge Animate, they've just picked an awful name for it. If you scroll through the features, it's clearly targeted towards one particular type of content, not 'web design'.

adding a meta tag with name="generator" content="Google Web Designer 1.0.0.924" was enough for it to open for me.

Looks like it's a rebrand of Motorola's Ninja:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/07/ninja-...

via @ElliotGeno

Fantastic. I've been waiting for this to happen, and not the least bit surprised it's coming from Google.

I've been super excited for the HTML5/Canvas/JavaScript takeover of web interactivity from the grips of Flash, but the one thing I kept seeing in almost every single tutorial is that it's mostly - still - hand-coded stuff. That's cool for programmers, but the reality is that the "mass" market (among designers) isn't going to really adopt HTML5 until there are well-established visual tools.

Procedural graphic design is a fun exercise, intellectually interesting, and can have some amazing results, but the market for that type of design work is really limited.

This should help drive a real, solid, mass-designer-market adoption of the new standards. Cool.

Might be useful to let marketing department guys crank out ad banners without bothering any devs. I'm still waiting for http://macaw.co/ for responsive site & application prototyping.

In my experience, that will also unfortunately encourage them to crank them out without any designers ;)

As someone who's trying to get into web development (not professionally), apps like Macaw makes me want to buy a Mac. Windows is so limited compare to Mac in this regard.

It sounds like Macaw will (eventually) come to Windows:

https://twitter.com/macawco/statuses/378215232512208896

That's great to hear!

However my point still stands. Windows is really behind Mac in regards to development software (or any type of software in general). Maybe I'm underestimating the Windows ecosystem, but that's been my observation over the years. I'd like to be proven wrong.

Macaw seems like a tool for web designers who are afraid of code. If you want to be a web developer, use a text editor. If you want to be a good web designer, use a text editor and learn Sass or Less. If you want to be a mediocre web designer, use whatever.

I'm currently using a text editor (Sublime Text 3). And I like it but it have its own challenges. I don't want to be a web developer, I'm just doing this as a hobby and to design/maintain my personal website. So it doesn't really matter if I'll be a mediocre web designer or not.

You can color me skeptical until we see actual HTML5/CSS spit out by this - regardless of who writes it, I'm always doubtful of the efficacy of any automated/wizard-driven code generation in the general sense.

I'll lump this in with Dreamweaver for now.

It looks like the site itself was generated with it. You can do a view/source to get an idea of what it might spit out.

This is exactly my feeling. If it's cranking out noisy code, then I don't want anything to do with it.

It's clearly meant for the advertising space, so compression is actually what is being desired here.

This will die a quick death just for its deceptive name. It should be called Ad Designer.

It's fairly easy to turn it into a full-fledged site design application.

Perhaps it should actually be called Flash Pro for HTML5 - that's what I see it as.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=web+designer

Edit: The down votes are warranted, but I would wager that there at least a few people who will take the 'I need a web designer; search for same; well maybe I'll try this' path. That's all.

"Available for Mac and PC". I'd say it doesn't sound very attractive.

You are not the intended audience/user.

But it's called "Google Web Designer", so many of us web developers probably thought we were the target audience. I first thought it was a Dreamweaver competitor with better support for JS libraries and HTML5, which would be great.

Instead we have "Google Ad Designer" targeted at designers and marketers. OK, I was still interested at least to play with it for a while and see if I could recommend it to my designer friends, but no Linux support and worst of all, they use PC as a synonym of Windows and Mac as a synonym of Mac OS X. Sorry, but this isn't the 90's anymore, go back to your time machine.

So, I agree I'm not the target audience, but you have to admit the announcement can be perceived as misleading and off-putting.

Sounds pretty attractive to me.

Not Snow Leopard. Requires Macos X 10.7 +.

why

Doubtlessly he's bemoaning the lack of support for linux.

I would also like linux support, but it still looks like an impressive suite regardless.

The design crowd probably are using a Mac or a Windows.. (it took me a minute to see PC = Windows, and remember this is a "machism" for Windows)

Linux is a thing mostly for coder types, and probably would want the source code attached to it.. and probably since they dont want tho share this code with us.. no Linux version for now

no Linux support, I'm assuming - GNU/Linux is my preferred workspace environment.

I'm really happy that it looks like Photoshop and not like GIMP. Good UI is essential for widespread adoption.

It's necessary, but not sufficient. Look at Microsoft Blend for Visual Studio (formerly Microsoft Expression Blend), for example.

I don't think it was such a bad tool, it just targeted a dead-end platform (Silverlight)

And a not-so-dead-end platform (WPF).

Well, that's been killed off too effectively. All focus is on WinRT (that hardly any are using)

Interesting that this is a desktop program and not a web application. Not even "coming soon to your Chromebook".

I'd laugh if I didn't think it was so pathetic. Google seems to have more of a disconnect in what each hand is doing than Microsoft...and that's saying a lot.

This sounds a lot like Tumult's Hype:

http://tumult.com/hype

One of the primary complaints about Hype is that its HTML / CSS / JS output isn't very clean. I wonder if Google's tool produces better output.

EDIT: Looks like not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6470640

Tumult Hype's exports are essentially 3 lines of HTML so it is easy to embed in other documents and output mostly takes the form of JSON animation data and a JavaScript runtime file. It isn't meant to be hand-edited or even read, since we minify heavily to keep file sizes extremely small.

While everything has its tradeoffs, we went with this approach because:

- Our app has a lot of animation and interactivity capabilities not meaningfully expressed through anything but JavaScript. For example, we don't use CSS3 Animations nor transitions because they aren't powerful enough (pausing, synchronization, etc.).

- We have better control over how we express the DOM to the browser. There's plenty of browser bugs or incompatibilities which sometimes require us to on-the-fly change the DOM structure or which properties we are using.

- The user could easily bork the output so it could not be read back in

- No tool will ever produce output that will appease everyone :)

We provide lots of hooks in and outside of the runtime for your own JavaScript and HTML so you can still customize quite a bit.

So it isn't that our output isn't very clean (in fact I'm quite proud of the runtime and how we've been able to add features without increasing bloat); it is that edits are meant to happen from the app itself.

Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I do in fact agree it is probably unreasonable for people to expect automatic code generation to be hand-editable without disturbing the machine-editable workflow, but it is something that comes up a lot.

I see that Google's tool also seems to produce rather inscrutable output (see my edit to my original post). This does sound like one of those really hard problems where is pretty much impossible to balance the needs of the machine-modifiability with human-readability.

Thanks again for the reply!

Yes, we ultimately felt it was a fool's errand, especially because we're a startup with limited resources so we need to focus on the right problems. When we launched version 1.0 long ago it seemed like this wasn't necessary for a "minimum viable product" considering we're targeting graphic designers who might not have as much coding experience anyways.

There hasn't been much that's swayed us otherwise -- I think it was the right call.

Another product without linux support from Google. This is getting frustrating.

Yeh, it sucks. But don't worry, when enough people get hooked on it, they will move it online, before integrating it into google+.

Or end of life it. One of the two. Good luck!

It usually happens when they buy something that's already non-linux ready.

Tested it out here: http://raymondgh.link470.com/googlewebdesigner/ Google Web Designer http://i.imgur.com/xEQZdx5.png Aurora 26.0a2 http://i.imgur.com/FElMNKj.png iOS Safari http://i.imgur.com/Miqw6bq.png IE 10.0.9 http://i.imgur.com/yqXaJlL.png Totally different appearances

It's surprising to me how many people are complaining about the lack of a Linux version. A Linux version would be great! but let's put our idealogical hats aside, and think like a business.

The intersection between their target audience, and Linux is minute! Unless it came for free, investing in a Linux version of the app would have been a terrible use of resources

Linux runs the web, this is a "web design" application we are talking about. Imagine Ford releases a new car model but just for Airplane pilots.

1. The Google web Designer is not bad. 2. It't more intuitive than Dreamweaver--by far. 3. I think they should deemphasize the Ad functionality. 4. They should offer a few basic templates--maybe be I missed them? 5. Templates were important in my learning curve. Trying to memorize WC3 examples didn't work for me. Experimenting with a template helped me a lot--plus I could put up rudimentary websites quick. 6. If anyone from Google stumbles upon this; remember you have multiple generations of people out there that would love to learn how to put up a web page. 7. Put up some video tutorials. You are hemoraging money, but I've noticed you seem to depend on customers to post "how to videos", or maybe hire some out of work 30-65 year olds to produce the videos. Some of your older users know how to communicate without using too much tech lingo--isn't that the purpose of ths Editor? If their videos do the trick pay them, and don't expect them to move to your campus-let them work at home. Working at home has some benefits.

Does anyone know what this program is written in. Just out of curiosity, it looks like it's something custom, does not use default widgets on OSX. It does not look like Java, I think it's all HTML5.

Just wondering.

Judging from the output, Google has resurrected Frontpage 2000...

I got very surprised when I saw the download-button. Will the Chromebooks be able to run this?

You know what would be useful? An app like this from Google that outputs Google index-optimized code for SEO purposes.

In one fell swoop Google could educate the masses as to what search engines consider "good" code and simultaneously destroy the "machine-gun-the-fish-in-a-barrel" approach marketing people use for SEO.

Instead, we get Adobe Motion 2.0 HTML5 Street Fighter Edition Now Featuring Blinky-Movey-Thingies.

This is what Adobe should have created when they realized Flash was going to die.

As an engineer it's interesting to be on the receiving end of software replacing a bit of what you do. I suppose the market will always incentivize replacing expensive labor (high wages for developers cut both ways).

Granted, there have long been wysiwyg editors and this is a relatively simple part of the job of a web dev, but it's just another example of software eating the world.

I think this looks like a great tool. I can almost imagine this being built 100% for ads, and then someone higher up at Google saying "Wow, this thing is so powerful it could build websites" and then it morphed into this existence. Just pure speculation but it's a little weird to call it Google Web Designer when everything else puts ads front-and-center.

I second that. The support page almost screams that.

With Webflow, Adobe edge, and others coming on the market what do prognosticators say about the future of the web design business? Is Roger McNamee's notion from two years ago going to come true? http://www.businessinsider.com/roger-mcnamee-video-2011-7

No Chromebook support? Interesting.

http://web.archive.org/web/19970210151434/http://www1.sausag... this was state of the art in 1996 :-) It was killed by places like GeoCities where you build your site "online."

All through the 90's web sites that let you build web sites were quite the rage, and then pagemaker/frontpage/et alia seem to just take over. Not entirely sure why but they did. Now here we are 17 years later doing it again.

I spent a number of years "liberating" my data from FrontPage by basically creating a new CMS and sucking it from html scrapes into a modifed version of markdown. I hope that Google learns from that experience and always provides for an 'easy' way to liberate your content from their tool so someone doesn't get stuck.

Hello All,

First I want to thank you all for taking the time to check out Google Web Designer and giving us your feedback! Keep it coming!

Over the last 24 hours we have received a ton of great feedback. One of the biggest questions/comments that I keep hearing is in regards to the broadly scoped name, "Google Web Designer". We chose this name intentionally. We know that it is a lofty name, but we have big plans on living up to it.

It is true that in our beta offering there is a strong focus on rich media. With the proliferation of mobile and Google being a huge player in advertising, we think that rich media was a solid first use case to tackle. Over time we plan on growing our tool set and functionality so that you can create any web content that you so choose.

This is just the beginning. You have the ear of the entire product/engineering team and with your feedback we hope to shape this tool into something special.

Thanks again!

Tony Product Manager | Google Web Designer

Installed. Tried it. Uninstalled.

Interesting, but unless you're designing ads, this release is probably not worth your time.

Just gave it a spin on the Mac.

I was very surprised to see that there are no templates...which makes it very hard to determine stuff like...is there any way to align columns and text?

Here's what I made in about 15 minutes:

http://so.danwin.com/googltest.html

It's quite easy to place things and the animation is pretty straightforward. What is extremely painful is how things behave when you click on things...like, it took me some time to figure out how to edit a Text box that I placed, and also how to change it from a paragraph to a headline.

In terms of usability, I can't image how this will be productive for anyone, including newbies. In the medium to long term, most people would be far off better learning how to do basic HTML in a text editor, GUI be damned here.

I'm happy to see this tool because we do need to get those ad developers/designers (whoever they are!) to stop producing output which consumes high cpu. But if this doesn't fix that problem then we're spreading the issue to our non-flash tablets and mobile devices, which could be a painful change from the static ads we currently enjoy on those devices.

However, I'm disappointed to see that this deals with fix-sized units exclusively. The web is supposed to be fluid, ads and other content should be encouraged to be percentage-width based, or at least responsive to different screen sizes and layouts. This tool produces fixed-size ads, when they could have used it to encourage a big change towards responsive advertising.

Reminds me a similar tool by Sensha: Sensha Animator. http://www.sencha.com/products/animator/

Do you know if Google developed the technology themselves or if it is from an acquisition?

It looks like this is based on the Ninja Authoring Tool which is an open source project, but also Google would have gotten as part of their acquisition of Motorola Mobility.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/07/ninja-...

https://github.com/mikestowe/ninja

This will almost solely be used for making ads. It’s Google’s answer to Apple’s iAd Producer https://developer.apple.com/iad/iadproducer/ and Adobe’s Flash Pro.

Well I suppose 'better than Flash' can't be a particularly high bar to jump.

Couldn't open existing HTML files. Seems files must be created in GWD to be edited.

It says available for the PC. the button is grayed out for me? Surely people as bright as Google knows PC != Windows? Surely PC means PC running mainstream operating systems like oh I don't know...Linux?

I'm a PC user who wipes Windoze off my hdd as part of setting up my preferred working environment.

Is there any plan to include Linux, and, or, BSD versions of Google Web Designer any time soon?

Mac users may find the Windows layout confusing or frustrating.

Ugh, glad I have a grip on HTML/CSS now and dont have to rely on tools like this or Dreamweaver.

I think Dreamweaver actually helped me code better because after class I would always work at cleaning up the shoddy Dreamweaver auto-generated code. Kids kept wondering why I always passed validations after writing code, I stopped using Dreamweaver unlike everyone else in that class.

Is this "any platform" as long as it runs Chrome?

Getting tired of more and more Google products apparently not being tested to work in Firefox.

Nope, I'm using Ubuntu and instead of download link see this message: "Available for Mac and PC"

look at the code it produces. It makes MS FrontPage look clean and elegant.

As someone who works in a museum designing web and html5 exhibit media, it makes me a bit sad that upon opening all the defaults are specific to creating advertisements. I know that's the business that Google is in, I just wish they would stop pretending that they have the same goals as their hypothetical "World History Museum."

As the market gets more mainstream designers need differentiation - something beyond even HTML5. So I'll give a shout out for another of the little guys - just launched...

http://www.digitalworkshop.com/products/opus-creator.shtml

Paul

I just started playing around with it. It has a very simple learning curve. Within 10 minutes, I was comfortable using the application. I would love to see some figures on cross-browser compatibility. It's an excellent tool for making HTML5 animations. This is my only apprehension right now.

This is really cool. While it's obviously aimed at people making ads (which makes sense for Google), this seems very useful for any kind of interactive element on a web page. I'm pretty sure I'll use it.

Cue the sensational headlines heralding web developers becoming obsolete. These tools keep getting better. Instead of rendering web developers obsolete, they just force everyone to be better.

Am I the only one to get the below error (in XP)?

  The procedure entry point GetSystemDefaultLocaleName could
   not be located in the dynamic link library KERNEL32.dll.

Same here, in the German version of XP:

  Der Prozedureinsprungpunkt "GetSystemDefaultLocaleName"
  wurde in der DLL "KERNEL32.dll" nicht gefunden.

No thanks, Google. I'll use free software to make web pages.

Hi,

Google Web Designer is free. ;o)

Thanks, Google Web Designer team

Hi,

The poster definitely meant free-as-in-speech software. Nevertheless, I'm unable to test it right now since it is not available for desktop Linux.

I take it from a few comments here that Google Web Designer uses Chromium Embedded Frame. I have ported Adobe Brackets, which uses Chromium Embedded Frame too, and it's not too difficult. Hardly a day's work. Is there a date when Google Web Designer will be available for desktop Linux?

Thanks, Pritam Baral

I haven't been able to find a link to download the source code, and the web page doesn't mention the license anywhere. I think you may have misinterpreted "free software". In any case, thank you for trying to help.

I think they meant actual free software: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software

Unless your wink is an attempt to mock them.

Hi,

No, we misunderstood what davexunit meant by "free" and are sorry for the confusion.

Thanks, Google Web Designer team

I notice it's retina-ready on OS X. Definitely appreciated!

You know what this looks? Chromium OS will be integrated in Android, as a HTML5 application framework.. running side by side with the Dalvik apps..

So they are investing in productivity tools for people to create apps for this new platform that will make it soon in the Android platform

This is a nice strategic move from Google.. since their ecosystem(the one they profit over) are the web.. the app ecosystem may be a shot on its own foot, since they cant control the cloud consume behavior by the device owners on apps in the same way they can on the web "platform".. (like the android forks from amazon and possible other big players)

That was a long stretch there pal.

Not if you remember who is in charge from the android ecosystem now.. there's certainly a fusion movement between Android and Chromium OS happening..

So its easy to think of some HTML app ecosystem showing up in android, without switching off the current Dalvik ecosystem..

I would call it "Google adds designer" instead.

We need a head-2-head with Adobe Edge: http://html.adobe.com/edge/

Let's hope this isn't the new Dreamweaver!

Is Dreamweaver heavily used anymore? I don't honestly know, I haven't worked with anyone that used it in at least 7 years or so.

I started with DW back in 1999 as a crutch while I learned markup and styling. Gradually phasing out the visual editor over the years I got so accustomed to the code editor (highlighting/shortcuts) that I still use (and prefer) it.

DW got/gets a bad name because of it's visual editor (and therefore lower bar of entry) but it's no better/worse than any other visual editor.

Sadly it is introduced as industry standard for many students. Mainly for design schools where they also require Photoshop.

Dreamweaver generates a lot of nested tables and I don't think google will do that sort of thing. (do like bootstrap though)

DW doesn't "generate" tables ..maybe you're thinking of exported Fireworks images? Those generate tables to create "sliced" images.

If the source code of that page is any indication then "no" it doesn't look like it is generating tables. It is using div etc.

I don't understand: can you just use it to create graphics and effects or you can also work on logic to build something interactive?

My corporate network policy blocks the installation. They need a standalone install that doesn't require google update.

Up until now, how has the typical animations you see on landing pages been achieved? Is it all manual animation via code?

If Google decides to couple this up with their cloud services, I wonder what does this announcement mean for Weebly?

Why are people accusing google of this really being an ad tool when on their help page they call it an ad tool?

http://html5maker.com looks more promising...

If the Web Designer team are reading this, I would really recommend renaming the tool to ad designer.

They should learn a thing or two about marketing Everytime I see a google product - it mentions ads !

No Chrome OS version? Disappointing.

Well there goes my web design job...

Ironically it looks like the UI is a straight design rip from Microsoft's expression suite.

Does anyone know what was used to build this? is this using the Chromium Embedded Framework?

Makes sense to me.

Easier to make websites --> More websites --> More ads --> More money for Google.

That's why google wanted flash on Android at first place , ads+drm. Google always like flash unlike Apple and even ship with it's own Flash plugin.

But Adobe decided Flash was too expensive to maitain on mobile and fired 700 employees and outsourced the rest of the Flash team to india. The remaining employees are now working on Bracket (...). And Sencha is more profitable than Flash division at Adobe.What's left of Macromedia? nothing, They should have stuck with Livemotion and Golive ... lol

The result is that the last version of Flash (CC) has less features than the previous ones ( some drawing tools gone...)

so why did they make this? flipping thru the help docs, seems to be for creating responsive ads (not a surprise I know) -- so they want to kill off flash but maintain the animations and flash ad style things out there for youtube and what not?

Ads with animations are more profitable because more people click on them. Since flash is dying, they want an alternative that runs anywhere, so they can display interactive ads anywhere and profit more.

If this thing came from Adobe named Adobe Dreamweaver 2013 nobody would take notice.

Finally! A tool to direct people whose websites I don't want to make to use.

Oh good, another way for front end developers to avoid learning how to code.

Just started taking web design courses, can't wait to give this a try.

Be sure to stick with your courses. Understanding the underlying technologies are more important than familiarity with toolsets that come and go. This is just the next phase of a long lineage of web design tools including Hot Dog, Homesite, FrontPage, Dreamweaver, etc.

Its day too shall come and pass...

Hotdog!

This is nice, I wish google's web designer was an actual WEB app

Would this work as a tool for indie game designers instead of Flash?

>that can run on any device >not available for Linux

No Linux version Not open source Proprietary file format

Had my attention for only three minutes!

Why does this use absolute positioning?

why not?

I wish this were a self-hosed web app.

What will be output? WebGL or canvas?

Still a desktop app - there you go!

Is there a countdown clock yet for when this will be end of lifed?

urgh, can't download with linux

Please for the love of god less of these generated development tools. I remember having to clean up a frontpage/dreamweaver generated codebase, kill me...

comes with rootkits. a typical googleware

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