Sparkle calls itself a “vector drawing tool, uniquely tailored” for creating websites. In use, we found it most reminiscent of Pages, with a workflow based around drag-and-drop and free layout.
Web pages are constructed from containers — standard boxes, “wide boxes” that span the entire screen width, and text blocks — as well as embedded elements such as images, videos and components from third-party websites, where you copy and paste code into a Sparkle sheet. There are no themes to give you a head start, but Sparkle provides useful page templates to work with — or you can start from scratch with a blank page.
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Given that mobile accounts for plenty of online traffic, it’s good to see Sparkle tackle responsive design. At each of five viewport sizes, you can adjust your site, resizing and moving components (but you can’t delete them from here).
From a technical perspective, Sparkle fares less well. Code output is — as with similar apps — bloated and not that semantic. This isn’t a tool for pros.
In some ways, it’s also quite raw — it’s easy to delete a page from the sidebar, and exporting is basic — only to a Finder folder. But if you’re still mourning the loss of iWeb, Sparkle will likely prove a wise investment. It already matches or betters its contemporaries in the consumer space, offers potential, and the app is in active development.
The bottom line. Feels slightly unfinished, but offers usable consumer-oriented website creation for a good price.
