Macaw Scarlet – Live Design Environment

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

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

This tool seems targetted specifically at designers and front end devs, a distinctly visual group with a high level of overlap with the "appreciates cool front end techniques" group. Maybe in this case it's actually a canny strategy for getting their attention?

If this was a tool for capturing and analysing network packets in vim, probably not as appropriate...

I also noted that the site loaded and animated poorly in FF, but was much smoother in Chrome. I thought it was a much nicer experience when I switched browsers. Does that say anything about this tool? Possibly!

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

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

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

It's just one of those tools who has a single purpose and as soon as you try to do something outside of it, you need to use something else. I mean HTML/CSS isn't exactly the most hard thing to rite in the world.

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

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

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

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