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.
You never used Dreamweaver in your life. It has a great template system which make it easy to generate static websites, live inspection with an embedded webkit engine , and a very good style manager. Dreamweaver is definetly productive when it comes to integration or prototyping.
But you'd have to go out of your way to get your hands on it since the Download button is inert unless their javascript can confirm that you are in fact using Windows or so. Doesn't seem to work with wine's built-in browser, and I couldn't get past the clickwrap EULA with an old chrome-based browser running under wine either.
Lack of support for Linux is a consequence of not being a webapp, and that is what I really don't like (even if this was supported on Linux, OpenBSD and Solaris). Is expecting that Google can deliver cutting edge web-based apps really weird?
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
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.
I am, mostly because it's wrong and helps in perpetuating misconceptions. I use a PC with Linux, you can use a Mac with Windows or Linux (and others), and nowadays Macs are PCs with a prettier design, so saying "PC and Mac" is completely meaningless. It's like saying "Mobile phones" when it only works in Android. You then have to take the time to explain to normal users why it doesn't work in their iPhones or Blackberries.
As someone who happened to use Linux on their PC while coming across this submission, I was confused for a while as to why the download button was disabled. ;)
Ah, thank you. I've been trying to work out why no one seemed to be mentioning it. I flicked to Chrome, used a proxy ... still greyed out without any explanation.
Google are seriously bad at web design and copy writing it seems based on this.
I think this metonymy helps reinforce the idea that there isn't a conceptual difference between hardware and software, or that they are inherently a single integrated product.
If you value various aspects of keeping hardware and software separate, then not reinforcing this association -- and instead trying to draw the distinction -- is valuable.
A lot of people in a discussion like this will point out that many computer users don't know what an OS is in the first place, or don't draw any distinction between the computer, the OS, and the browser. That's true, but avoiding using the individual proper names of these things makes it even more true!
It depends on the kind of designer we are talking about, it's not all about graphics design. Web designers (you know, the ones probably targeted by this software) don't need to depend heavily on Adobe applications and can comfortably use Aptana Studio for web design on Linux.
However, I was referring to myself. I was interested but couldn't use it, so I won't recommend it, as simple as that. I think software relies heavily on network effects, and many possible early adopters probably are running Linux too.
In my experience designers tend to be quite conservative in their choice of tools and probably won't ditch Flash just because this application appeared today. Developers are usually much more keen on trying out the latest tool, it's part of the trade.
In my opinion, it's a mistake to imply "Get the hell out of here, you're not the target audience" when you probably depend in these people to recommend the software to your target audience.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't blame Adobe if your Flash banners were crap. "Adobe software" is broad, covering a lot of ground. You're turning your back on the whole lot? Sounds irrational. Maybe check out this new Google tool, and see how you feel after about 10 minutes.
Using closed source tools is about trust. When the trust is broken, nothing can get it back. That's what happened with Adobe and Developpers , they totally lost that market.
He isn't refusing to put time into learning Adobe tech because they produced bad code, he's refusing to put time in because Adobe knifed the Flex development community in the back. Then in the front. Then stabbed them in the back 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.
The upper end of five figures is perfectly respectable for that kind of work. I can't imagine people with Adobe product experience are in such short supply to warrant six figures...
In the bay area, Flex devs make > $100/hour, pretty much implying a 6 figure annual rate. Maybe the 5 figures are from another area or country.
As a former Flex developer, I must admit that Flex was the best thing that ever happened to web development, but unfortunately the Flash team wasn't strong enough to bring the runtime to mobile with enough quality. Building a RIA in Flex was so incredibly easy, and debugging was easy, and you really could use anything you wanted for a backend (I've used Perl, PHP, and Java). Bidirectional data binding, an excellent widget library, and a lot of help from the default IDE (custom build of Eclipse) allowed me to build software, full stack, with an engineering team of 1 on a weekly release cycle.
I've spent more time debugging HTML5/JS/CSS than building entire applications in Flex. The AdvancedDataGrid component alone was worth the price of admission.
Totally agreed. The problem with Flex is it was designed for developer ease first and user experience second. Virtually every code example reimplemented a regular HTML form feature in Flash. You always knew when you hit a Flex app on the web because the first thing you'd see was a "loading" bar.
I used to work for Macromedia but I knew the moment Flex was released they'd taken the wrong turn from complimenting web standards to trying to build their own proprietary platform on Flash. To the user it was only marginally better than Java applets.
I think you mistake the intended audience of Flex. As a former Flex dev all of the apps I was involved with were for enterprise, building complex apps. None of the marketing or talks I attended from Adobe were around building your blog in Flex. People using Flex to make their "webpage" were indeed in the wrong.
Flex is still good for some $100-$120/hr consulting gigs on the side, mostly maintaining or changing something for a company who no longer employees a full time flex dev. Each year since Adobe "killed Flex" this hourly rate has gone up while the # of gigs has gone down. I would not, nor recommend, anyone start a Flex app today for a new project.
AngularJS is the closest thing to Flex that I've used, and only recently has tooling started to come close to what Flex had years ago.
JS/CSS is painful in comparison (esp when you consider large corps are still on IE6, 7, or 8), but still the right choice today for new RIAs. One can only hope the death of XP next year gets these corps to to do something...
Nothing of the sort, all in all, Flex is indeed a great platform. The sad reality is that it only runs on a crappy, obsoleted runtime (Flash) so it is not useful for most web development, but otherwise everything he says is true.
For a web app (RIA) I would pick Flex or Silverlight any day over the whole HTML mess if they would only run properly in all browsers, desktop and mobile.
>>>> 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.
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.
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.
Please change the webpage to allow downloads in Linux (or any other OS) - many people would like to at least try it in WINE. Also, your "Available for Mac and PC" button is confusing - most Linux users run it on a PC.
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!
There's this entire platform of users who develop in a magical language called C# and run entirely on Microsoft platform. It might just catch on and get quite popular.
The Microsoft world might also be used by large corporations, who also happen to have lots of money, with which you can buy things like software.
(There's also these other platforms based on *nix, but meh :-p)
I'm pretty sure the majority of digital artwork, both visual & audio, is done on OSX. I have never heard of any major company in this field that had its artists on anything other than OSX. Maybe linux for some render-farms or something, but the artists' primary workstation is macosx. Also, all the major digit-art tools work sooooooo much better under OSX, or even just under Linux.
Example, I've used Autodesk's Maya under windows and under Linux 64bit. The exact same machine, dualboot, into Linux to run Maya is like night & day. This simple little kitchen scene[1] was too much for Windows to handle, would freeze up the mouse pointer while trying to rotate around and work on the models. In linux, silky smooth. Also, the audio-production software on mac is superior to anything ever. Avid ProTools, Logic Pro,etc. Imagine the kinds of scenes LucasArts/Pixar/Dreamworks/etc got going on. When you're project starts to get big and require more RAM to keep it all in memory and flowing well; Linux & OSX will beat Windows completely. Now I'm not going to put all the blame on Windows, perhaps AutoDesk and Adobe don't put as much quality work into the Windows versions. And why should they? Really, I see the Windows versions as just gateways for beginners and young people to pirate them and learn.When you get serious and it's your profession, you switch to OSX. Yes, I said it. Any serious digital-artist is on a mac. Good day sir!
SIDENOTE: If Adobe made linux-versions of all their stuff, combined with the already-existing linux versions of Maya and 3DSMax, I believe it would be very good for the digital-art industry.
What?! All the digital printing agencies I've been to were using iMacs. I live in a country with a Per Capita of $3,500. That's more than an order of magnitude lower than the US.
I keep forgetting America is the only developed country in the world. I guess I'm so busy playing games on my PC and surfing the net on my HTC One, that sometimes I forget I'm poor and only bought these devices because I couldn't afford to buy Apple.
</sarcasm>
You really need to get some perspective about just how big the IT industry is outside of America.
Considering the very powerful, hardware accelerated 3D games that run smoothly under Windows, I would consider the possibility that if Maya cannot render a scene without freezing, maybe that is a problem with the software developers and not Windows.
Well, I am from Europe and from people I know only around 15% uses Mac. I was myself using Windows/Linux for all development and Photoshop work till last 3 years, when I moved to Macbook Air.
> “Drastically?” The vast majority of the web developers I know use OS X.
I'm guessing most (all?) the developers you know work in the US?
Mac OS is close to nonexistent in that area in the rest of the world.
Trying to sell an app competing against a free product from Google is already challenging enough, you should seriously consider the original advice and extend your tool to work on Windows as well.
> Mac OS is close to nonexistent in that area in the rest
> of the world.
I guess you dont't live in the rest of the world. I am from a small exUSSR country in the Europe and while I would not claim majority for OS X but to claim that it is nonexistent is very wrong. My last company (Java/PHP/Frontend) was Mac-only. In the current company the majority is on Macs (that includes Android and WP developers).
Also Dutch here. Developers go with Windows if they do not get a choice; unfortunately, most major companies demand everyone uses Windows.
I'm fortunate to be working for a consultancy company that just gives everyone a budget to buy their computer. Most people have a Macbook, with the odd exception that simply has a hatred for Apple or can't get used to it.
I would argue that development tools are much better for OSX. It's like Linux, but usable. A lot of commandline tools just work out of the box under OSX, where you have to go through hoops, hope there's a port, or install a bash emulator under Windows.
Really? My last web developer position in Australia was in an office full of Macs. My web developer position previous to that was in New Zealand was in an office full of Macs. My current position here in the UK is in an office full of Macs. Every web development house I've ever worked for, contracted with or freelanced with has been in an office full of Macs.
In some circles yes, but theres alot of web developers that are still on Windows for whatever reason. I am from Germany and people here are less prone to brand marketing and i still see quite alot of people using Windows, even people i highly respect for their skills. Im mainly talking about coders though, not designers.
I will say here, that I am one of those people that do not like OSX. My main issues are getting it to behave with the muscle memory I have developed over years of use with windows and linux machines. Home and End key behavior, actually quitting an application when closed, full-screen apps (though I understand this is fixed in recent OSX builds), and other minor annoyances keep me from fully embracing OSX. I understand that these are personal preferences, and not problems with OSX for the most part.
On the other hand, I REALLY like the idea of an app and all its dependencies being installed all in one folder. That REALLY needs to happen everywhere. This would make migration between installs SO much easier, and would eliminate DLL hell (or shared library hell in the case of linux).
Exactly my thoughts. I use OSX alot for different reasons but i still think i am more productive on Windows/Linux. Keyboard shortcuts and behaviour is consistent as opposed to OSX where its kind of a pain.
I also dont like the dock, i like to have a taskbar with the open windows on each of my monitors which is no problem in Windows and Linux. I dont like the Menubar stuck on the main monitor.
As a web developer i really like the unix base of OSX for different reaons though and i need to use some software for game dev (Unity3D) which isnt available on Linux.
But i thought about running Windows for game dev/office stuff and Linux in a VM for web development.
And literally zero of the web developers and designers I know use OS X. This is why a single person's social circle isn't a useful indicator of global marketshare.
Yeah, and a Mac is a PC, internally speaking too. So, it should OS based : OSX, Windows. This, coming from the number 1 tech company in the world. Kinda disappointing.
This has nothing to do with prescriptivism whatsoever. This is like calling the blue "e" icon in your desktop "The Internet". It's just plain wrong naming.
In tech, things should be called by their name, or you risk future confusion.
It's Apple that made PC synonymous with Windows machines (with all their "Mac vs PC" ads). Yes technically speaking it's incorrect, but that's human language for you, it just happens. Sometimes the other way round, eg. walkman was once Sony's tradename, but eventually all portable cassette players were called so.
Not really, it actually comes from long before that.
I remember being a very little kid and buying shareware games with their "PC-Compatible" labels. At the time, that sticker actually meant "DOS Compatible", and being I just about 10 years old, I believed PCs and DOS were the only possible match, the same way my first MSX ran MSX-Basic and my cousin's Amstrad CPC ran CP/M. I didn't know it was even possible for machines to run different OSes. For that matter, I didn't even know what an OS was. I just knew different machines worked differently, the same way different TV sets worked differently.
So it's not just a matter of human language, it's a matter of intentionally confusing terms in favour of the market. Everybody knew there were other "walkmans" around. Not everybody knows there are other OSes.
Clearly Apple subscribes to this terminology, and I don't think it has much of an interest in putting forward the impression that Windows is the only option on PCs and concealing the existence of Linux.
I think it does. From the very beginning they wanted to sell computers to people by making them think they work like home appliances. If people knew computers are actually universal machines, then they wouldn't be as willing to pay more for the same components with a different brand printed on the machine's case, or a different software running in them.
Besides, that gives them a single competitor to fight against.
Is it really easier to face one big nearly monopolist opponent instead of two who're fighting against eachother? Also one important obstacle for the adoption of Apple products was the common notion that there's no plausible alternatives to buying a PC. That's why they invested heavily in sending the message of pluralism - "think differently" etc.
Sadly Google has more or less stopped supporting Linux on desktop since Larry Page came into office (Picasa and others...). Hardly surprising. Even though at Google everyone uses a flavor of Ubuntu for their desktops.
I don't think tumultco would see ROI porting to Windows or Linux. Quite apart from the actual development effort, managing two or more codebases, dealing with Windows fragmentation and piracy... ugh.
Yes, you'd drastically expand your potential client base – but end up with worse revenue and higher support costs per customer.
As long as we're doing shameless plugs: checkout my cross-platform product at http://tweenui.com/animator – it's for creating simple HTML5 animations (focus is mobile display ads) in the browser. You can download the result or publish to the cloud.
You might consider hosting that intro video on a better platform, buffered so slowly for me with a 120MB connection. Granted your site is probably getting hit by HN, but when attention spans are so short, many may give up long before I did.
Thanks for reporting this; our site should be able to handle this amount of traffic no problem and the video loads pretty quickly for me. Where are you located and does the problem still happen?
We've moved nearly all of our other videos to youtube, so if it really is our server you can click the "watch more" buttons on the main page to still get a feel for the app.
It may be tough, but porting your application to Windows would be a great idea and help you compete against Google in the long run. Good luck with it, and from what I've checked around on your website it seems like a great tool/competitor to Google!
(I'm on a Mac, still I have Windows machines and know a huge amount of web-developers who abide by Windows)
Love your attitude. If you can position yourself as the best alternative to Google's product it's not a bad place to be - they may expand the market. Good luck.
"it is really just team vs. team" -- that's a great way of looking at it. Good luck with the additional attention and hope you can convert new eyes into more customers.
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....
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.
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
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.
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...).
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)
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!
#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."
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Google Web Designer (GWD) uses the WebKit HTML rendering engine inside the application's workspace and reports the styles that are actually applied to the content during editing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 389 ms ] threadDW 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.
I would also like linux support, but it still looks like an impressive suite regardless.
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
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.
I would expect better from Google.
Google are seriously bad at web design and copy writing it seems based on this.
If you value various aspects of keeping hardware and software separate, then not reinforcing this association -- and instead trying to draw the distinction -- is valuable.
A lot of people in a discussion like this will point out that many computer users don't know what an OS is in the first place, or don't draw any distinction between the computer, the OS, and the browser. That's true, but avoiding using the individual proper names of these things makes it even more true!
You know professional designers who only work with Linux? I don’t.
However, I was referring to myself. I was interested but couldn't use it, so I won't recommend it, as simple as that. I think software relies heavily on network effects, and many possible early adopters probably are running Linux too.
In my experience designers tend to be quite conservative in their choice of tools and probably won't ditch Flash just because this application appeared today. Developers are usually much more keen on trying out the latest tool, it's part of the trade.
In my opinion, it's a mistake to imply "Get the hell out of here, you're not the target audience" when you probably depend in these people to recommend the software to your target audience.
I'll lump this in with Dreamweaver for now.
https://twitter.com/doubleclick_pub/status/38471531196005171...
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).
Easier to make websites --> More websites --> More ads --> More money for Google.
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...)
https://twitter.com/macawco/statuses/378215232512208896
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.
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&...
http://html.adobe.com/edge/animate/
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.
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 a former Flex developer, I must admit that Flex was the best thing that ever happened to web development, but unfortunately the Flash team wasn't strong enough to bring the runtime to mobile with enough quality. Building a RIA in Flex was so incredibly easy, and debugging was easy, and you really could use anything you wanted for a backend (I've used Perl, PHP, and Java). Bidirectional data binding, an excellent widget library, and a lot of help from the default IDE (custom build of Eclipse) allowed me to build software, full stack, with an engineering team of 1 on a weekly release cycle.
I've spent more time debugging HTML5/JS/CSS than building entire applications in Flex. The AdvancedDataGrid component alone was worth the price of admission.
I used to work for Macromedia but I knew the moment Flex was released they'd taken the wrong turn from complimenting web standards to trying to build their own proprietary platform on Flash. To the user it was only marginally better than Java applets.
Flex is still good for some $100-$120/hr consulting gigs on the side, mostly maintaining or changing something for a company who no longer employees a full time flex dev. Each year since Adobe "killed Flex" this hourly rate has gone up while the # of gigs has gone down. I would not, nor recommend, anyone start a Flex app today for a new project.
AngularJS is the closest thing to Flex that I've used, and only recently has tooling started to come close to what Flex had years ago.
JS/CSS is painful in comparison (esp when you consider large corps are still on IE6, 7, or 8), but still the right choice today for new RIAs. One can only hope the death of XP next year gets these corps to to do something...
For a web app (RIA) I would pick Flex or Silverlight any day over the whole HTML mess if they would only run properly in all browsers, desktop and mobile.
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.
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
Our docs team has updated the help links.
Thanks, Google Web Designer team
http://tumult.com/hype/
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!
Google's free offering is cross platform already.
And, I guess, most of the marketers, too.
You're actually discounting the entire world outside of SV right now?
The Microsoft world might also be used by large corporations, who also happen to have lots of money, with which you can buy things like software.
(There's also these other platforms based on *nix, but meh :-p)
|pushes button to delete nix|
Hey, where did 60% of my favorite website go? Oh, I'll just google how to undelete *nix... wait... crap!
That is an amazing thing to write on the internet.
1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNS66CcUJ1o
SIDENOTE: If Adobe made linux-versions of all their stuff, combined with the already-existing linux versions of Maya and 3DSMax, I believe it would be very good for the digital-art industry.
No sir!
</sarcasm>
You really need to get some perspective about just how big the IT industry is outside of America.
People will use the enviroment where the tools run stable.
I'm guessing most (all?) the developers you know work in the US?
Mac OS is close to nonexistent in that area in the rest of the world.
Trying to sell an app competing against a free product from Google is already challenging enough, you should seriously consider the original advice and extend your tool to work on Windows as well.
I'm fortunate to be working for a consultancy company that just gives everyone a budget to buy their computer. Most people have a Macbook, with the odd exception that simply has a hatred for Apple or can't get used to it.
I would argue that development tools are much better for OSX. It's like Linux, but usable. A lot of commandline tools just work out of the box under OSX, where you have to go through hoops, hope there's a port, or install a bash emulator under Windows.
Of course, .NET developers will be using Windows.
And this is a two year old observation.
1) Big corporations don't like to overspend on PC hardware and can have great deals with anyone but Apple.
2) A company that work mostly on Windows platform (.Net, MSSql)
4) As weird as it sound some people might actually not like OSX.
On the other hand, I REALLY like the idea of an app and all its dependencies being installed all in one folder. That REALLY needs to happen everywhere. This would make migration between installs SO much easier, and would eliminate DLL hell (or shared library hell in the case of linux).
Just my 2cents
I also dont like the dock, i like to have a taskbar with the open windows on each of my monitors which is no problem in Windows and Linux. I dont like the Menubar stuck on the main monitor.
As a web developer i really like the unix base of OSX for different reaons though and i need to use some software for game dev (Unity3D) which isnt available on Linux.
But i thought about running Windows for game dev/office stuff and Linux in a VM for web development.
Oh yes. I wouldn't take a job if they offer Apple only choices.
That's what we call a filter bubble
Most of the people i know just use Windows (Belgium)
Prescriptivists.
In tech, things should be called by their name, or you risk future confusion.
I remember being a very little kid and buying shareware games with their "PC-Compatible" labels. At the time, that sticker actually meant "DOS Compatible", and being I just about 10 years old, I believed PCs and DOS were the only possible match, the same way my first MSX ran MSX-Basic and my cousin's Amstrad CPC ran CP/M. I didn't know it was even possible for machines to run different OSes. For that matter, I didn't even know what an OS was. I just knew different machines worked differently, the same way different TV sets worked differently.
So it's not just a matter of human language, it's a matter of intentionally confusing terms in favour of the market. Everybody knew there were other "walkmans" around. Not everybody knows there are other OSes.
Besides, that gives them a single competitor to fight against.
Yes, you'd drastically expand your potential client base – but end up with worse revenue and higher support costs per customer.
We've moved nearly all of our other videos to youtube, so if it really is our server you can click the "watch more" buttons on the main page to still get a feel for the app.
(I'm on a Mac, still I have Windows machines and know a huge amount of web-developers who abide by Windows)
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..
Do companies actually believe this? Flash is the easiest to remove of all ads.
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.
But its Branded as Google Web Designer. :)
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)
#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!
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'd agree that it was not the original goal of HTML to develop full applications.
There seem to be a hidden agenda in everything Google does these days.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
There hasn't been much that's swayed us otherwise -- I think it was the right call.
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.
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...
Calling it "Google Web Designer" was a terrible decision, but that's clearly not what the tool was meant for.
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
Do you know how much code this is for a runtime and how many browser incompatibility issues this solves.
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.
That sounds just condescending to me.
What is the problem with a < 4kb runtime and some browser hacks?
{\"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
Draw one rectangle. Save as rect1.
Draw a second rectangle. Save as rect2.
Show us the diff between rect1 and rect2.
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.
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.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=3618...
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"
Meaning what? Google isn't directly involved with WebKit anymore and can't make them implement standards.
Microsoft and FrontPage did the exact same thing back in the days.
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.
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)
Google Web Designer (GWD) uses the WebKit HTML rendering engine inside the application's workspace and reports the styles that are actually applied to the content during editing.
Thanks, Google Web Designer team
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.
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)
<div id="rectangle"></div>
#rectangle { width: 200px; height: 150px; background #FF0000; }
...by default?
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
Regards Mparaiso.
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.
Google Web Designer is free. ;o)
Thanks, Google Web Designer team
Unless your wink is an attempt to mock them.
No, we misunderstood what davexunit meant by "free" and are sorry for the confusion.
Thanks, Google Web Designer team
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