Maqetta HTML5 Authoring tool by IBM

IBM has announced an HTML5 authoring tool called Maqetta at IBM Impact 2011 conference in Las Vegas. Maqetta is an open source WYSIWYG HTML5 editor, supporting features like drag and drop to create HTML5 user interfaces. It provides support for both Desktop and Mobile user interfaces.

Maqetta interface in itself is written in HTML5 and runs from within the browser without any need for plugins. It can be downloaded and installed on personal servers or used on maquetta.org. It seems Maqetta is pronounced like “Maketta”, a spelling variation of “maqueta”, the Spanish word for mock-up.

The key features of Maqetta include:

• a WYSIWYG visual page editor for drawing out user interfaces
• drag/drop mobile UI authoring within an exact-dimension device silhouette, such as the silhouette of an iPhone
• simultaneous editing in either design or source views
• deep support for CSS styling (the applications includes a full CSS parser/modeler)
• a mechanism for organizing a UI prototype into a series of “application states” (aka “screens” or “panels”) which allows a UI design to define interactivity without programming
• a web-based review and commenting feature where the author can submit a live UI mockup for review by his team members
• a “wireframing” feature that allows UI designers to create UI proposals that have a hand-drawn look
• a theme editor for customizing the visual styling of a collection of widgets
• export options that allow for smooth hand-off of the UI mockups into leading developer tools such as Eclipse
• Maqetta’s code base has a toolkit-independent architecture that allows for plugging in arbitrary widget libraries and CSS themes

The full list of features can be seen here.

Hope this is only the beginning and we see some serious HTML5 authoring tools. I am looking at Adobe and even the Eclipse foundation to bring out something amazing for HTML5. And in all that, may be just may be Google might come up with something amazing. Yes, GWT to an extent provides that, but even that requires more programming knowledge (Java) so is no good for designers.

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