Showing my age. My first thought upon reading this was "holy crap, Easel[1] is still around?!"

[1] http://www.thefreelibrary.com/VMARK+SOFTWARE,+INC.+AND+EASEL... - I can't find a better link. Easel was a '4gl' in the early-mid 90s (and maybe late 80s), one of the earlier event-driven UI programming languages. It was kludgy and annoying to code for, but ahead of its time in a lot of ways.

I ran through the guided demo/walk-through and was sad to see that the export to HTML/CSS contained a crap ton of ID selectors. I only played with it for 5 or 10 minutes, but I found this:

Say you remove the id tag of #signup-form and change it to some arbitrary classname. The styling immediately goes away on the element! Somewhere there's a hard-coded style on the ID selector for the purposes of a pretty demo. This doesn't sit well with me.. You can see this is true when you click on the "Edit Project CSS" from the top menu item. I should've been able to change that ID to a class or combination of classes and not affect the styling on the fly.

Likewise, I'm a bit concerned what would happen by adding several classes. It doesn't appear as though they're each uniquely and independently tied to their own styles via the right adjusted area. If you want to do anything non-trivial, I believe you're stuck with manually entering the CSS in the "Edit Project CSS" pane on your own, which is worse than using your own IDE with automated updates in the browser via LESS, SCSS, SASS, HAML, Stylus, etc.

All I'm trying to say is better handling of classes would be much appreciated for those of us who prefer to try and widgetize and create reusable components. Beyond that, it looks nice :)

I've checked out a bunch of these tools and they all seem rather lacking.

I admit to only giving each one five minutes but they usually fail my simple test:

Can I easily create a new row and add some content to it without it doing funky things (i.e. adding stupid positioning CSS that forces me to align it manually or make it look different to the rest of the page).

"Since the web is viewed in a browser, we believe it should be built in one too."

Seriously?

So Github is getting into live online editing. Good move.

This is a logical extension to supporting the Github ecosystem. The relatively massive amount of investment money they received was a signal that this would happen. I also can see a few other plays possible, and if they do them well, they could become a $10B company. They will have some stiff competition - whoever has a better vision will win though. Execution and the time it takes doesn't really matter in this instance, as it's such a broad play. If I end up having the time, maybe I'll jump into the game. Congrats to Easel. Checking out the product. Hopefully they include it in Github's monthly fee. :)

Congrats are in order, I guess.

Yet, no promises for new features, or even vague ideas about Easel's future direction: is this a talent acquisition? If so, would it not be much more honest to your users to just make that clear?

I absolutely love how GitHub acquires technology and people, not one or the other. It's awesome that they keep what they bought running, like Speaker Deck, and now Easel.

Yet another nice looking project that I learn about after the acquisition. This has always been a tough problem to solve. Seems like they were on the right track, hopefully it will only get better as a part of GitHub.

It might be a naive question, but having read on how GitHub works (holacracy, no management and all that), how a decision like this is made and sanctioned.

Are there other services out there like Easel?

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Time will tell why they bought Easel, for now it seems Github decided to go after Dribble (or geocities?)

Does anyone know what they're using for the Tour steps?

Well, it doesn't work on IE11.

Holy crap! Congrats ben!

congrats ben and matt!