Full disclosure, my company just released a Photoshop plugin that converts Photoshop images into web sites.

First of all, I think the idea behind Macaw is great. A lot of the people at my company really admire their work and there is a solid target market that would want to use Macaw.

One of the things to keep in mind is that the target market is, likely, primarily designers and not developers. Important to keep in mind so we don't have a skewed developer perspective. Hand coding is a poor medium for prototyping or doing design mock ups, but can be quite fast if you know exactly what you are doing and you already have image assets.

Another under served market are designers that love using Photoshop, especially to do mock ups and prototypes, but cringe when it comes to turning those mock ups into actual web sites. Unfortunately, Photoshop has basically the worst tools, if you can call them that, for turning Photoshop images into a websites.

Our response is a tool we call Webbsy.

Basically, you just name any layer or layer group like a CSS selector like #header or .header. Run Webbsy, and it slices all the images and generates the HTML and CSS using the names you gave it.

Like Macaw, it generates clean HTML using static positioning and floats and divs with clear. It respects layer groupings as well so if your #logo layer is inside your #header layer, the HTML/CSS will do the same. It uses static positioning by default, but allows the use of absolute positioning as well. Actually, until I saw the Macaw video, I thought we were the only ones who had an algorithm for making code that doesn't use absolute positioning.

This is really important because in a real website, the lines of text may render shorter or longer depending on the font rendering engine. This can cause unsightly overlaps or too much white space.

Webbsy also allows slicing, linking, it automatically makes Google fonts work, converts rectangles into divs, text is preserved as text, etc.

We also are just about to release our reference sheet feature. If you are a coder but just don't want to spend all the time doing rote monkey work like copying over fonts, spacings, colors, etc. then use the reference sheet. It generates all the CSS styling (but not positioning/layout) and shows you thumbnails of all the assets. You then write all the layout and HTML by hand but still save hours on transposing code.

Our next feature, coming soon, is auto export so you don't have to do any renaming of layers. This has less control and selectors are generated automatically but is perfect for showing clients a work in progress without having to ship JPEG or PNG images through email. This also means you get real previews so your fonts look like they would in a website. One problem with mockups is that your 9px font looks fine using Photoshop's font rendering engine, but looks really bad in a browser rendering of a font. When a client asks for a few changes, you can make them in minutes and just re-build the site in Webbsy instead of wasting time trying to figure out how to modify the HTML/CSS.

Finally, we will be coming out with more modes and features that help designers that use Photoshop make conversions the way they want to. One of the things we recognize is that designers work in different ways. Some need to write all the code by hand (which is what our reference sheet is for) and others don't mind how the code looks as long as the web page looks right.

You can find us at www.webbsy.com

Sunny