Google Web Designer

This appears to be a fork of the Ninja Authoring Tool which was made by Motorola Mobility over a year ago as part of the Montage project. Now Google owns Motorola Mobility.<p><a href="http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/07/ninja-power-open-source-html5-toolset-hopes-to-unleash-the-web/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;information-technology&#x2F;2012&#x2F;07&#x2F;ninja-...</a>

The most important feature of this (to Google(?)) is the built-in ad editor.<p>It&#x27;s the last point on the feature list page, but it&#x27;s very telling that it&#x27;s the <i>first</i> thing on the &quot;Create New&quot; screen.<p><a href="https://support.google.com/webdesigner/answer/3261498?hl=en&amp;ref_topic=3261495&amp;rd=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;webdesigner&#x2F;answer&#x2F;3261498?hl=en&amp;...</a>

Downloaded. Opened. Drew a rectangle. Filled with #FF0000.<p>It spit this out:<p><a href="https://gist.github.com/JacksonGariety/6766626" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;JacksonGariety&#x2F;6766626</a><p>(after struggling and realizing CMD+S wasn&#x27;t saving my file)<p>I feel sorry for whoever was tasked with making this application.

Ok, the war is on. Does anyone know of a good HTML5 ad blocker?<p>Flash was <i>awesome</i>. It made it <i>really easy</i> to block animated ads. My browsing experience had been wonderful ever since I installed a Flash blocker a few years ago. Also did wonders for my battery life.<p>Please, please help my browsing experience remain wonderful. Thanks.

Interesting that this is being released as a native app, rather than a web app.<p>It uses Chromium Embedded and a fairly custom UI, so it looks like it&#x27;s all HTML anyway. Maybe they packed it up as an app to get better FS permissions (amoungst other things).

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&#x27;s twitter stream.<p><a href="https://twitter.com/doubleclick_pub/status/384715311960051712" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;doubleclick_pub&#x2F;status&#x2F;38471531196005171...</a>

I tried to open an existing html file and got:<p><i>&quot;Unable to open file due to the following error: The file was not created in Google Web Designer.&quot;</i><p>So, basically, Google is just creating their own proprietary format that&#x27;s built on HTML. Even if you are just using it to construct ads you&#x27;ll be somewhat locked-in to this toolchain. Since HTML is inherently open people will be able to build converters but it&#x27;s still a bad precedent.

Looks like it&#x27;s a rebrand of Motorola&#x27;s Ninja:<p><a href="http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/07/ninja-power-open-source-html5-toolset-hopes-to-unleash-the-web/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;information-technology&#x2F;2012&#x2F;07&#x2F;ninja-...</a><p>via @ElliotGeno

Fantastic. I&#x27;ve been waiting for this to happen, and not the least bit surprised it&#x27;s coming from Google.<p>I&#x27;ve been super excited for the HTML5&#x2F;Canvas&#x2F;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&#x27;s mostly - still - hand-coded stuff. That&#x27;s cool for programmers, but the reality is that the &quot;mass&quot; market (among designers) isn&#x27;t going to really adopt HTML5 until there are well-established visual tools.<p>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.<p>This should help drive a real, solid, mass-designer-market adoption of the new standards. Cool.

Might be useful to let marketing department guys crank out ad banners without bothering any devs. I&#x27;m still waiting for <a href="http://macaw.co/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;macaw.co&#x2F;</a> for responsive site &amp; application prototyping.

You can color me skeptical until we see actual HTML5&#x2F;CSS spit out by this - regardless of who writes it, I&#x27;m always doubtful of the efficacy of any automated&#x2F;wizard-driven code generation in the general sense.<p>I&#x27;ll lump this in with Dreamweaver for now.

This will die a quick death just for its deceptive name. It should be called Ad Designer.

&quot;Available for Mac and PC&quot;. I&#x27;d say it doesn&#x27;t sound very attractive.

I&#x27;m really happy that it looks like Photoshop and not like GIMP. Good UI is essential for widespread adoption.

Interesting that this is a desktop program and not a web application. Not even &quot;coming soon to your Chromebook&quot;.

This sounds a lot like Tumult&#x27;s Hype:<p><a href="http://tumult.com/hype" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tumult.com&#x2F;hype</a><p>One of the primary complaints about Hype is that its HTML &#x2F; CSS &#x2F; JS output isn&#x27;t very clean. I wonder if Google&#x27;s tool produces better output.<p>EDIT: Looks like not: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6470640" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6470640</a>

Another product without linux support from Google. This is getting frustrating.

Tested it out here: <a href="http://raymondgh.link470.com/googlewebdesigner/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;raymondgh.link470.com&#x2F;googlewebdesigner&#x2F;</a> Google Web Designer <a href="http://i.imgur.com/xEQZdx5.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;xEQZdx5.png</a> Aurora 26.0a2 <a href="http://i.imgur.com/FElMNKj.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;FElMNKj.png</a> iOS Safari <a href="http://i.imgur.com/Miqw6bq.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;Miqw6bq.png</a> IE 10.0.9 <a href="http://i.imgur.com/yqXaJlL.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;yqXaJlL.png</a> Totally different appearances

It&#x27;s surprising to me how many people are complaining about the lack of a Linux version. A Linux version would be great! but let&#x27;s put our idealogical hats aside, and think like a business.<p>The intersection between their target audience, and Linux is minute! Unless it came for free, investing in a Linux version of the app would have been a terrible use of resources

1. The Google web Designer is not bad. 2. It&#x27;t more intuitive than Dreamweaver--by far. 3. I think they should deemphasize the Ad functionality. 4. They should offer a few basic templates--maybe be I missed them? 5. Templates were important in my learning curve. Trying to memorize WC3 examples didn&#x27;t work for me. Experimenting with a template helped me a lot--plus I could put up rudimentary websites quick. 6. If anyone from Google stumbles upon this; remember you have multiple generations of people out there that would love to learn how to put up a web page. 7. Put up some video tutorials. You are hemoraging money, but I&#x27;ve noticed you seem to depend on customers to post &quot;how to videos&quot;, or maybe hire some out of work 30-65 year olds to produce the videos. Some of your older users know how to communicate without using too much tech lingo--isn&#x27;t that the purpose of ths Editor? If their videos do the trick pay them, and don&#x27;t expect them to move to your campus-let them work at home. Working at home has some benefits.

Does anyone know what this program is written in. Just out of curiosity, it looks like it&#x27;s something custom, does not use default widgets on OSX. It does not look like Java, I think it&#x27;s all HTML5.<p>Just wondering.

Judging from the output, Google has resurrected Frontpage 2000...

I got very surprised when I saw the download-button. Will the Chromebooks be able to run this?

You know what would be useful? An app like this from Google that outputs Google index-optimized code for SEO purposes.<p>In one fell swoop Google could educate the masses as to what search engines consider &quot;good&quot; code and simultaneously destroy the &quot;machine-gun-the-fish-in-a-barrel&quot; approach marketing people use for SEO.<p>Instead, we get Adobe Motion 2.0 HTML5 Street Fighter Edition Now Featuring Blinky-Movey-Thingies.

This is what Adobe should have created when they realized Flash was going to die.

As an engineer it&#x27;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).<p>Granted, there have long been wysiwyg editors and this is a relatively simple part of the job of a web dev, but it&#x27;s just another example of software eating the world.

I think this looks like a great tool. I can almost imagine this being built 100% for ads, and then someone higher up at Google saying &quot;Wow, this thing is so powerful it could build websites&quot; and then it morphed into this existence. Just pure speculation but it&#x27;s a little weird to call it Google Web Designer when everything else puts ads front-and-center.

With Webflow, Adobe edge, and others coming on the market what do prognosticators say about the future of the web design business? Is Roger McNamee&#x27;s notion from two years ago going to come true? <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/roger-mcnamee-video-2011-7" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;roger-mcnamee-video-2011-7</a>

No Chromebook support? Interesting.

<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/19970210151434/http://www1.sausage.com/hotdog32.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;19970210151434&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www1.sausag...</a> this was state of the art in 1996 :-) It was killed by places like GeoCities where you build your site &quot;online.&quot;<p>All through the 90&#x27;s web sites that let you build web sites were quite the rage, and then pagemaker&#x2F;frontpage&#x2F;et alia seem to just take over. Not entirely sure why but they did. Now here we are 17 years later doing it again.<p>I spent a number of years &quot;liberating&quot; my data from FrontPage by basically creating a new CMS and sucking it from html scrapes into a modifed version of markdown. I hope that Google learns from that experience and always provides for an &#x27;easy&#x27; way to liberate your content from their tool so someone doesn&#x27;t get stuck.

Hello All,<p>First I want to thank you all for taking the time to check out Google Web Designer and giving us your feedback! Keep it coming!<p>Over the last 24 hours we have received a ton of great feedback. One of the biggest questions&#x2F;comments that I keep hearing is in regards to the broadly scoped name, &quot;Google Web Designer&quot;. We chose this name intentionally. We know that it is a lofty name, but we have big plans on living up to it.<p>It is true that in our beta offering there is a strong focus on rich media. With the proliferation of mobile and Google being a huge player in advertising, we think that rich media was a solid first use case to tackle. Over time we plan on growing our tool set and functionality so that you can create any web content that you so choose.<p>This is just the beginning. You have the ear of the entire product&#x2F;engineering team and with your feedback we hope to shape this tool into something special.<p>Thanks again!<p>Tony Product Manager | Google Web Designer

Installed. Tried it. Uninstalled.<p>Interesting, but unless you&#x27;re designing ads, this release is probably not worth your time.

Just gave it a spin on the Mac.<p>I was very surprised to see that there are no templates...which makes it very hard to determine stuff like...is there any way to align columns and text?<p>Here&#x27;s what I made in about 15 minutes:<p><a href="http://so.danwin.com/googltest.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;so.danwin.com&#x2F;googltest.html</a><p>It&#x27;s quite easy to place things and the animation is pretty straightforward. What is extremely painful is how things behave when you click on things...like, it took me some time to figure out how to edit a Text box that I placed, and also how to change it from a paragraph to a headline.<p>In terms of usability, I can&#x27;t image how this will be productive for anyone, including newbies. In the medium to long term, most people would be far off better learning how to do basic HTML in a text editor, GUI be damned here.

I&#x27;m happy to see this tool because we do need to get those ad developers&#x2F;designers (whoever they are!) to stop producing output which consumes high cpu. But if this doesn&#x27;t fix that problem then we&#x27;re spreading the issue to our non-flash tablets and mobile devices, which could be a painful change from the static ads we currently enjoy on those devices.<p>However, I&#x27;m disappointed to see that this deals with fix-sized units exclusively. The web is supposed to be fluid, ads and other content should be encouraged to be percentage-width based, or at least responsive to different screen sizes and layouts. This tool produces fixed-size ads, when they could have used it to encourage a big change towards responsive advertising.

Reminds me a similar tool by Sensha: Sensha Animator. <a href="http://www.sencha.com/products/animator/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sencha.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;animator&#x2F;</a><p>Do you know if Google developed the technology themselves or if it is from an acquisition?

This will almost solely be used for making ads. It’s Google’s answer to Apple’s iAd Producer <a href="https://developer.apple.com/iad/iadproducer/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;iad&#x2F;iadproducer&#x2F;</a> and Adobe’s Flash Pro.

Well I suppose &#x27;better than Flash&#x27; can&#x27;t be a particularly high bar to jump.

Couldn&#x27;t open existing HTML files. Seems files must be created in GWD to be edited.

It says available for the PC. the button is grayed out for me? Surely people as bright as Google knows PC != Windows? Surely PC means PC running mainstream operating systems like oh I don&#x27;t know...Linux?

I&#x27;m a PC user who wipes Windoze off my hdd as part of setting up my preferred working environment.<p>Is there any plan to include Linux, and, or, BSD versions of Google Web Designer any time soon?

Mac users may find the Windows layout confusing or frustrating.

Ugh, glad I have a grip on HTML&#x2F;CSS now and dont have to rely on tools like this or Dreamweaver.<p>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.

Is this &quot;any platform&quot; as long as it runs Chrome?<p>Getting tired of more and more Google products apparently not being tested to work in Firefox.

look at the code it produces. It makes MS FrontPage look clean and elegant.

As someone who works in a museum designing web and html5 exhibit media, it makes me a bit sad that upon opening all the defaults are specific to creating advertisements. I know that&#x27;s the business that Google is in, I just wish they would stop pretending that they have the same goals as their hypothetical &quot;World History Museum.&quot;

As the market gets more mainstream designers need differentiation - something beyond even HTML5. So I&#x27;ll give a shout out for another of the little guys - just launched...<p><a href="http://www.digitalworkshop.com/products/opus-creator.shtml" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digitalworkshop.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;opus-creator.shtml</a><p>Paul

I just started playing around with it. It has a very simple learning curve. Within 10 minutes, I was comfortable using the application. I would love to see some figures on cross-browser compatibility. It&#x27;s an excellent tool for making HTML5 animations. This is my only apprehension right now.

This is really cool. While it&#x27;s obviously aimed at people making ads (which makes sense for Google), this seems very useful for any kind of interactive element on a web page. I&#x27;m pretty sure I&#x27;ll use it.

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.

Am I the only one to get the below error (in XP)?<p><pre><code> The procedure entry point GetSystemDefaultLocaleName could not be located in the dynamic link library KERNEL32.dll.</code></pre>

No thanks, Google. I&#x27;ll use free software to make web pages.

I notice it&#x27;s retina-ready on OS X. Definitely appreciated!

You know what this looks? Chromium OS will be integrated in Android, as a HTML5 application framework.. running side by side with the Dalvik apps..<p>So they are investing in productivity tools for people to create apps for this new platform that will make it soon in the Android platform<p>This is a nice strategic move from Google.. since their ecosystem(the one they profit over) are the web.. the app ecosystem may be a shot on its own foot, since they cant control the cloud consume behavior by the device owners on apps in the same way they can on the web &quot;platform&quot;.. (like the android forks from amazon and possible other big players)

I would call it &quot;Google adds designer&quot; instead.

We need a head-2-head with Adobe Edge: <a href="http://html.adobe.com/edge/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;html.adobe.com&#x2F;edge&#x2F;</a>

Let&#x27;s hope this isn&#x27;t the new Dreamweaver!

I don&#x27;t understand: can you just use it to create graphics and effects or you can also work on logic to build something interactive?

My corporate network policy blocks the installation. They need a standalone install that doesn&#x27;t require google update.

Up until now, how has the typical animations you see on landing pages been achieved? Is it all manual animation via code?

If Google decides to couple this up with their cloud services, I wonder what does this announcement mean for Weebly?

Why are people accusing google of this really being an ad tool when on their help page they call it an ad tool?

<a href="http://html5maker.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;html5maker.com</a> looks more promising...

If the Web Designer team are reading this, I would really recommend renaming the tool to ad designer.

They should learn a thing or two about marketing Everytime I see a google product - it mentions ads !

No Chrome OS version? Disappointing.

Well there goes my web design job...

Ironically it looks like the UI is a straight design rip from Microsoft&#x27;s expression suite.

Does anyone know what was used to build this? is this using the Chromium Embedded Framework?

Makes sense to me.<p>Easier to make websites --&gt; More websites --&gt; More ads --&gt; More money for Google.

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?

If this thing came from Adobe named Adobe Dreamweaver 2013 nobody would take notice.

Finally! A tool to direct people whose websites I don&#x27;t want to make to use.

Oh good, another way for front end developers to avoid learning how to code.

Just started taking web design courses, can&#x27;t wait to give this a try.

Hotdog!

This is nice, I wish google&#x27;s web designer was an actual WEB app

Would this work as a tool for indie game designers instead of Flash?

&gt;that can run on any device &gt;not available for Linux

No Linux version Not open source Proprietary file format

Had my attention for only three minutes!

Why does this use absolute positioning?

I wish this were a self-hosed web app.

What will be output? WebGL or canvas?

Still a desktop app - there you go!

Is there a countdown clock yet for when this will be end of lifed?

urgh, can&#x27;t download with linux

Please for the love of god less of these generated development tools. I remember having to clean up a frontpage&#x2F;dreamweaver generated codebase, kill me...

comes with rootkits. a typical googleware