- Posted by christhi on March 31, 2009
For those not taking Expression Blend serious you will now have to take another look at Blend as SketchFlow (just announced by Mix last week) now provides the ability to create rapid prototypes along with the documentation. You can rapidly create a storyboard of screens while adding notes in the process and the tool automatically provides the transitions. No code needs to be written to create a fully functionaly prototype! You are even given a set of controls that actually look like they have been drawn by hand to simulate an actual white board session. Everything you build in SketchFlow is a usable artifact in blend as user controls in XAML and code are created for you behind the scenes. This is extremely powerful as your designers can now design without worrying about code wireup yet you are able to pass on content designers generate, in the overall process, during the "buildout" transition. You can even import your exisiting visual comps from Photoshop into SketchFlow and it will convert the raster image into a vector (even leveraging the layers you have setup). I'll be blogging about sketchflow and how it fits into your overall application lifecycle management discipline in future posts. For more on where this fits into the lifecycle you can catch my session from Mix online at:
http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/c02f
