Macaw

» see macaw.co as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In the autumn of 2013, 2,752 people paid for a web design tool that did not exist yet. The Kickstarter ran from 2 October to 1 November and closed at $275,929 against a $75,000 goal, which for a desktop application aimed squarely at working designers was a large number. The pitch was five words long: stop writing code, start drawing it.

Version 1.0 shipped on 31 March 2014 for Mac and Windows. You drew boxes and text the way you would in an image editor, and Macaw generated the HTML and the CSS underneath as you worked, breakpoints and web fonts included. The code it produced was the entire argument. Jeffrey Zeldman, whose opinion on this subject carried more weight than almost anyone's, called it the superhot web design tool of the future, and that quote sat on the homepage until the homepage went away.

InVision announced it was acquiring Macaw on 26 January 2016. This was InVision's first acquisition, and the two companies had already been working together. Tom Giannattasio and his team went to work on InVision's prototyping products. Macaw itself was not shut down and was not merged into anything. It stopped being worked on, and stayed downloadable in that condition for most of three years.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually did ~

The category Macaw entered had a bad reputation earned over fifteen years. Visual web editors had always produced markup that a developer would open once and then rewrite by hand. Nested tables, and an inline style on every single element. The joke was old enough to be boring by 2014.

Macaw's answer was to treat the output as the product rather than as an export. It watched what you had drawn, worked out which elements shared a style, and wrote CSS that reused those styles instead of repeating them. You could set a global style once and change it in one place.

The result was not what a careful front-end developer would have written, but it was close enough that you could open it without flinching, which no previous tool in this category had managed.

~ bought and frozen ~

Nothing about the InVision deal was hostile and nothing about it was unusual. A four-person team with a hard-won reputation for layout engines is worth more inside a company building design software than it is selling a one-time license. The product kept working on the operating systems it already supported and slowly stopped working on the ones that came after, which is how desktop software dies when nobody is tending it.

For buyers this is the part with no good answer. Macaw was a paid application, not a subscription, so the people who had bought it owned a copy that ran fine on the Mac they had in 2016 and worse on every Mac after that. There was no server to switch off, so there was never a date to announce, until there was.

~ the last download ~

Support ended on 31 December 2018. The evidence is small and precise: on 24 September 2018 macaw.co still carried a line reading "Download free!" under the tagline, and by 5 January 2019 that line was gone while the rest of the page sat untouched. The same week, somebody opened an issue against Homebrew Cask titled "Macaw support ending on December 31, 2018", because the package manager was still trying to fetch a file that was no longer there.

I was never the customer for this. By 2014 the HTML I wrote was for internal tools and the real work was C++ and camera data, and I had last hand-built pages for forums as a student. But I did spend years in the era this tool was arguing with, back when the local wisdom on anything that generated markup for you was that you would be cleaning up after it by Tuesday. Macaw was the one that came closest to settling that argument, and it got absorbed before the argument was over.

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