> Certainly the future of application design should be with tools that understand the medium and the process.
This. The reason why web-design is very hard to abstract out into a Photoshop-like app is that because non-trivial websites are at their core, a fundamentally different medium than anything that Photoshop-familiar-designers are trained to create.
To treat the transition from visual-sketch to working-website as just some tedious code-work that gets in the way of brilliance and implementation is missing the point...the brilliance IS typically in the code that implements the vision in such a way that the site is maintainable and graceful across different platforms and screensizes.
This. The reason why web-design is very hard to abstract out into a Photoshop-like app is that because non-trivial websites are at their core, a fundamentally different medium than anything that Photoshop-familiar-designers are trained to create.
To treat the transition from visual-sketch to working-website as just some tedious code-work that gets in the way of brilliance and implementation is missing the point...the brilliance IS typically in the code that implements the vision in such a way that the site is maintainable and graceful across different platforms and screensizes.