Missing the bloody point

After I posted my review of Hammer – the simple to use, GUI app that helps me design with HTML – this week, several people tweeted a few alternatives. Oooh, oooh, let’s go look!

Lakshan Perera:

Hammer for Mac (http://hammerformac.com/) looks nice, but Punch is open-source and comes with lot more flexibility http://laktek.github.com/punch

Punch huh?

Let’s take a look.

Punch is a simple, intuitive web publishing framework that will delight both designers and developers.

“Simple.” “Delight(ful).” I like the sound of that. And there’s a video too. I like videos. This could be…

• Download and Install Node.js
• Install Punch npm install -g punch
• Create your site – punch setup mysite

Delightful. Yeah, I’m always delighted by a bit of node on the command line. Me and I bet countless other designers just love to create by typing punch setup mysite. Oh yes.

Next!

Nathan M Long:

I’m not sure I understand http://hammerformac.com/ when there’s http://jekyllrb.com/ and http://middlemanapp.com/ and others for $23.99 less…?

Well let’s compare, shall we? Oh yes lets!

Hammer installs via the Mac AppStore.

Jekyll on the other hand:

The best way to install Jekyll is via RubyGems:

gem install jekyll

Jekyll requires the gems directory_watcher, liquid, open4, maruku and classifier. These are automatically installed by the gem install command.

If you encounter errors during gem installation, you may need to install the header files for compiling extension modules for ruby 1.9.1. This can be done on Debian systems.

So. Totally the same fucking thing then.

Surely Middleman can’t be as bad. Surely that won’t assume that designers like me are comfortable with the command line or even know the bloody thing exists. Surely it won’t expect it, just because I know a bit of HTML and CSS.

Oh dear.