Ninja-uber Web design tool Macaw was just released! (31)
Could be very interesting for landing page design, and I know a number of us have been tracking it - the (apparently) revolutionary web design tool Macaw was just released.
It's got a free trial, too:
https://secure.macaw.co/
It does responsive design by default, so particularly interesting for mobile landers.
Videos: http://macaw.co/videos/
looks cool, am I old fashioned to just want to cling to my text editor?
Heres a $30 off discount code i found which takes it down from $180 to $150 and im amazed its a one off payment and they didn't make it into SaaS subscription
Enter TUTS in coupon code before april 5th
Forgot about this! I pre ordered it.
Going to download it now ;@)
Dang just as I'm getting used to Muse... This looks awesome, and hell yah on the 1 time price tag. Like augzie said, they totally could have made it saas.
Would love to hear some reviews if anyone ha had time to take it for a spin.
Slight learning curve.. I've never really used Muse, so can't comment compared to that (always stuck with Notepad++ ha).. but this "should" be the dogs nadgers for quickly mocking up landers and stuff.
I've just got to get the hang of creating break points for various widths, and then I'm probably up and running, fingers xx.
I'm intending to give it a spin this week, and shall report back if I manage to do so!
What do you guys think after testing this? I'm either going Muse or this 
I think it's really good. I know nothing about coding, web design or image editing but I was able to get the hang Macaw quickly. Built my first landing page within a few hours. As you can design responsive pages easily, I think it'll also be a valuable tool when I move onto mobile...
I haven't tried Muse so can't comment on that.
I've always been one to write code by hand, but watching those videos really makes me want to give this a go. There really is no point in wasting time doing it by hand if I can just whip up something similar if not better in so much less time.
Cheers for the response guys... Would also be very interested in how others have found it.
Just signed up for the trial... however, I have nothing to gauge it against really as I am just starting out!
Just so you guys know, that TUTS coupon which was supposed to be expired, is still valid to get it for $149
Any muse users out there try this app?
how does it compare ? Advantages over muse?
Muse seems to take care of my needs atm, but always looking for something new
from watching the tutorial video, seems like muse is more capable
cool tool for simple landers tho !
Has anyone tried it more seriously for mobile landers yet?
Not yet, it's on my list for this week. Watch this space!
Originally Posted by satori
I think a lot of programs e.g. Muse, Macaw, etc. will add jquery as a standard procedure and it can often be removed with no adverse effects.
However, you can be guaranteed that almost every smartphone has multiple jquery versions cached so if you switch the link to use the Google hosted libraries it will probably contribute little to load time.
Looks neat but you'd still want to poke around in the code anyway. CSS/html/jquery is as easy as it gets.
so basically most of you will use web designer tools to design the mobile lander instead of writing html codes?
Originally Posted by zeno
It's more then 1.5 year later. I'm doubting whether I should start learning Muse or Macaw for creating landingpages. What do you guys recommend?
@workforfreedom - Muse. Macaw wasn't very impressive last time I tested it. You could also look at Pinegrow, although I haven't tested it as fully as I'd like. If you're planning to do mobile, though, Pinegrow may be better.
InVision Acquires Design Tool Macaw
http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/26/pro...gn-tool-macaw/
InVision, a prototyping tool we’ve covered before, is acquiring code-based design tool Macaw.
As a refresher, InVision is a product and prototype design tool used by hundreds of companies including Uber, Twitter, and Airbnb. Launched in 2011, the company has since raised around $80M in four fundraising rounds.
The acquisition, which is InVision’s first, comes after a long collaboration between the two companies on products like Motion and Inspect.
Macaw, which has 125k active users, originally raised about $300,000 during a 2013 Kickstarter campaign. Tom Giannattasio, Founder and CEO of Macaw, explained that the company always wanted to join a larger team, and “InVision was the first time it made sense”.
InVision explained that acquiring Macaw will help them achieve their goal of bridging the design-to-development gap by implementing Macaw’s “design to code” features into InVision’s products.
Notably, InVision is not shutting down Macaw. The company will indefinitely allow access to the current version, while Macaw’s latest product Scarlet (a live, real-time design environment) will be bundled into other InVision products this year.
I did a short review of Macaw here and to be honest the current version downright sucks. I do hope InVisions makes something better out of this.
@shishev - Agreed. It's not very good.
Have you tried Pinegrow? I keep meaning to write a review for STM - it's a pretty good tool.
However, these days I'm mostly using Visual Studio Code to design landers...
@Caurmen I've never tried Pinegrow, just checked their site, it seems pretty interesting! I'll download it later today to check it out.
I've been trying to find a proper "wysiwyg" sort of tool for ages. If you're doing a review I could also record some walkthrough video of me trying to design a lander with it.
For a designer who's not too fond of coding stuff I get quite frustrated with landers, especially if I'm trying to convert any lander PSD to HTML from scratch. I guess there are others in the same position as me.
In all honesty, I think the best tool is a talented coder with a solid build process and good best practices. I know it's not what people want... but I've tested stuff too and its just never that good, and on export you always end up having to rip things apart to comply with affiliate speed-focused best practices (though I guess you can automate some of this).
Of all the tools I tested I think the random Coffeecup Responsive app actually annoyed me the list. Adobe Reflow was OK but not really in a production state.
You could always be a douche and make 3 different site versions/pages that are independent and fluid, then dump in 3 divs and have JS toggle visibility based on browser width. It would be award winning for how terribly DIY it is ahahaha.
Originally Posted by cmdeal
I agree with Zeno. You can have a competitive edge by being "coding savvy" - sizes of pages on Adplexity for example can often be reduced by 70%. JQuery is nice but if you're just using it to show/hide and fadeIn/out then its bloaty mcbloat bloat. I'm not saying everyone should stop creating campaigns and learn HTML/CSS/JS - I'm simply saying when you start seeing some auccess spare a bit of time to "play". Create landing page templates, get frustrated at how to position elements... Google how to make it work... Repeat. And in no time you'll be creating LP's from scratch in Notepad++ or whatever editor you use. My 2c
@mykeyfocus - I wonder if it's time for an affiliate-specialised JS library to replace JQuery? We could probably encapsulate 99% of the JQuery functions affiliates use inside a 2kb library...
(Although given how ubiquitous JQuery is and its hosting at Google, there's an open question as to whether using JQuery actually costs you much load time in the real world. More Testing Needed...)
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