Launched as a public beta just over a week ago, Sparkle is a new Mac app designed to let you build fully functional websites with no coding knowledge necessary. At its core it is a modern WYSIWYG editor that is super simple to use and more than powerful enough for building a static webpage such as a product promotional page or a personal landing page.

Design in full freedom, finely control positioning, use layout grids and smart snapping. Stay neat and tidy or break all the rules. Your web page is your canvas.

No HTML expected!

I’ve been playing around with Sparkle for a little while over the weekend and one of the features that stood out most for me is the easy ability to modify your layout design for different devices. It really is a breeze to dive in and change how the website displays on a smartphone so that it is as easy to read and view as it is on the desktop. Something that makes designing a website so very easy with Sparkle is its Live Preview function. Open a preview in your browser and it will be automatically updated whenever you make any change from Sparkle.

Sparkle includes over 600 fonts, and over 300 background patterns, as well as support for YouTube and Vimeo embeds. It’s a great start but I would like to see Sparkle add support for embedding Tweets; it would also be useful to be able to embed HTML code – a feature that’s not available at the moment. The other aspect to Sparkle that I think is missing at its current stage is HTML5 animations. I think some support for basic animations would be a really solid addition to really set this app apart from its competitors.

You can download and test drive the public beta of Sparkle for Mac here. Remember that if you do try Sparkle, the developers want to make it a better app, so give them some helpful feedback.