Back when GitHub acquired Easel, a collaborative, What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get HTML web design tool, Easel’s blog post on the matter implied that it would be sticking around. “Easel continues to run as it has,” it read.
Alas, things change. Nine months later, Easel is closing up shop.
So what was Easel? If you’re familiar with other WYSIWYG web design tools — things like Dreamweaver, or iWeb — imagine a somewhat trimmed-down version running inside of the browser built with team collaboration in mind. Easel was part of YC’s Summer 2012 class and was acquired by GitHub in January of this year on undisclosed terms.
We profiled Easel here and wrote of its acquisition here.
The news of the shutdown comes from the Easel team itself in its first blog post since the acquisition.
The service is now immediately closed to new users, and existing users have until October 31 to export the HTML/CSS for any projects they’ve built so far.