Static Site Generator Cactus Arrives on the Mac

▤ Summary

Koen Bok and Jorn van Dijk, veterans of the acclaimed Dutch software firm Sofa, have released Cactus for Mac, an attractive OS X version of their open-source static site generator. The idea behind Cactus is that it allows web designers to go back to hand-coding websites by creating an auto-refreshing local version of the site for you to view in your browser as you work on it. However, this type of tool only works with fairly static websites, though you can still rely on Javascript to add dynamic features like comments and forms. “After we quit Facebook, we looked at this thing and thought, ‘Hey, this is something that could become pretty big if we make it more accessible for web designers,’” Bok said. “It was pretty interesting to see how the design world responded to that mostly aesthetic change, so we took some of the cues of iOS 7 and mocked them up on the desktop to see how far we could push that,” van Dijk said.

▦ Linked Companies

Sofa B.V.

$1M to $5M