As any idiot will tell you, all learning is drudgery.

In the Elysian pursuit of less toil, I’ve been looking at an unique tool that promises to make a web developer’s life less of a drudgery.

No need to plow through books on HTML and CSS to create fine looking web sites.

In short, I’ve been searching for a tool that even Abhishek Bachchan can use to create web sites.

Eureka, that web design tool is Macaw.

Macaw is still in beta and it’ll be a couple of months before we can take a look at its final shape.

But I’m impressed enough by Macaw to write about it.

Watch the below video to get a peek into Macaw’s capabilities.

Macaw – EZ Web Design

Macaw owes its fame and hype to raising nearly $300,000 via the Kickstarter project a couple of weeks back.

The brainchild of Tom Giannattasio and Adam Christ, Macaw is touted as the “next generation web design tool.”

The big, big plus of Macaw is that you don’t have to worry your lil’ head about mastering HTML or CSS to create a fine-looking web site for the desktop or mobile devices like tablets or smartphones.

At the heart of Macaw is a design-to-code engine called Alchemy that is supposedly programmed to learn as you design. It seems the Alchemy engine will apply the same logic a developer would use like applicability, specificity and semantics.

In short, hand-code quality from a WYSIWYG like web development tool.

Who won’t love that. Who’ll say ‘no’ to that.

Macaw’s founders say Alchemy will also provide an advanced workflow for developers looking to pull code that meets their personal preferences.

Fluidity, reusable components and flexibility are the bedrock of Macaw.

Think of Macaw as the 21st century advanced version of FrontPage without all the negatives of FrontPage (like the special extensions that were required on the server side or being tied to Microsoft etc).

Since Macaw met its stretch funding goals, its founders are promising a new feature that will let developers preview their designs on multiple devices as they work.

The first version of Macaw should debut for the Mac OS X platform followed by an app for Windows.

At Kickstarter, 2,752 developers and other people were impressed enough by Macaw’s slick presentation to pony up $275,929, about $200,000 more than the goal of $75,000.

When Macaw is released in two months or so, I expect its pricing will be in the $150-$200 range.

SI can’t wait to play with Macaw.

God, I hope Macaw is not vaporware!

After all, the computer industry is no stranger to over-promising and under-delivering.

Now don’t blame Macaw if even Abhishek Bachchan takes up web design full time! 😉

Related Content
* Macaw Web Site
* Kickstarter Funding of Macaw

  Macaw