Macaw Scarlet – Live Design Environment

http://scarlet.macaw.co/

by jacobwg • 11 years ago

48 21 11 years ago

scarlet.macaw.co

atourgates• 11 years ago

Does anyone have experience with Macaw? Are you using it regularly?

I tried the demo a couple times, but didn't fall in love. It seems like a very compelling piece of software, so I'd like to hear if people using it.

erickhill• 11 years ago

Yes, unfortunately I have some mild experience with the original release.

"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.

ics• 11 years ago

Before there were any comments I thought about typing roughly the same sentiment. I only spent a few hours in Macaw before realizing it wouldn't actually help me get work done and figured I'd take another look when they got around to implementing more than the basics. Based on my experience I also took this announcement as essentially spinning off the useful parts (which regular Macaw users have probably been looking forward to) into a separate product. They have a trial which I recommend, since you can get a feel for the product pretty quickly now that it's actually available. As for what comes next, I'll evaluate it when it's an actual piece of software.

michaelbuddy2• 11 years ago

I agree and also have my copy of macaw lying dormant. in their defense though I think its just really hard to mix a drawing canvas with another 'canvas' where you're translating language to language. Adobe hasn't been able, nor has Corel or Xara or Serif and several other companies.

dubcanada• 11 years ago

I bought it, spent like a day in it, and then uninstalled it and returned to sublime text.

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.

TY• 11 years ago

Pretty much my experience as well. Bought it at a good discount, tried to make it work (consumed all books, online tutorials and examples before that) and went back to my text editor and Bootstrap after 2 days after discovering that I was spending more time fighting with the tool than creating useful things in it.

detaro• 11 years ago

Ah yes, the design environment for the web where all your users have new gaming PCs... (the i5 with a mid-class GPU below my desk can't display that page smoothly)

skimmas• 11 years ago

indeed

vortico• 11 years ago

I smiled in irony as the "Design for Responsive" text scrolled by at 0.5 fps.

mikekchar• 11 years ago

It is possible that you are "old" like me and thought that "responsive" meant "responds quickly to your input". These days "responsive" means that if you have a different size display than the person who designed the website, it isn't foobared. It is very difficult for me to repress snarky comments about the state of web design these days, but then I have to remember how ugly the web used to be in the good old days... Flashing red text on blue tiled backgrounds still haunt my dreams.

orthecreedence• 11 years ago

Is it just me or is modern web design degrading into flash-era sludge where you have to sit and watch 20 seconds of lines dancing around before you can get any information? As a nerd who can appreciate the technical aspects I'm even finding it extremely overdone and obnoxious. There are cases, such as telling an interesting/interactive story, where it makes complete sense. However for an informational/product web site, I'm generally not there to be W0W3d by your 31337 w3b skillz.

Am I just old fashioned?

woofyman• 11 years ago

The 3d stuff makes me nauseous.

8ig8• 11 years ago

I'm with you. As I was loading the page, it felt like one of those dreaded old splash pages.

aethr• 11 years ago

I guess, like every form of advertising, you have to know your market.

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!

interactiv2• 11 years ago

This is a tool for web designers so it makes sense to try something a bit flashy. Now is it efficient or does it help convey a specific message I don't know. To their credit the site is responsive and there is less animation on smaller screens.

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.

tiagok• 11 years ago

i'm a designer .. and learned to program 7 years ago . i really miss flash as a way to design experiences ! thinking design in html/js/css is a horrible way to live !

PebblesHD• 11 years ago

The idea is great, the concept of creating professional grade tools for something is admirable, but in this particular case, whats wrong with Brackets/Sublime/DW/Notepad and a web browser? I find trying to use these new tools results in me spending most of my time either fighting with them or writing custom code outside of them to get what I want done anyway. The website itself looks cool but has an awful frame rate on my i7 Laptop with 16GB of RAM and a Quadro 1GB, which isnt exactly slow.

interactiv2• 11 years ago

whats wrong with Brackets/Sublime/DW/Notepad and a web browser

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.

hayksaakian• 11 years ago

wow that's the first time in years that a website crashed my entire computer (currently using a 1.3ghz dual core new macbook)

sdrothrock• 11 years ago

I'm confused about Scarlet's place in the lineup.

Is it a complementary product for Macaw (now Indigo, apparently), or is it a successor?

michaelbuddy2• 11 years ago

Macaw indigo was really an app for starting a design but it worked via a proprietary file format. It could export html but couldn't open it. This new program opens html and works within it but has less drawing capability and seems to be more for tweaking like you might do with a text editor otherwise.

Macaw Scarlet – Live Design Environment

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