We all know or have heard how Sketchflow (introduced in Expression Blend 3) has really made interactive prototypes possible. Sketchflow is a tour de force in prototyping as well. In the preview releases of Blend 4 they keep adding very new and exciting features. Since this is in the public “RC” candidate I don’t mind mentioning how exciting this is before it sees final release because you really need to know that new capabilities will be introduced.
To get a preview of this open the RC and when the welcome screen comes up choose “Mockup Demonstration”.. This will bring up an already created “Sketchflow project” that is a tour of the new “Mockup Controls”..
after selecting the project will come up. Before running the project lets check out some new entries in the control toolkit..
These new controls will help you to mockup screens and UI functionality in Sketchflow.. Let’s look at project screens and walk through the prototype sample project.
Moving to an interactive prototype using Sketchflow from Balsamiq
The industry has many software programs available for creating “wireframes” and “mockups”. One of them (while less interactive) is the very popular Balsamiq Mockups. Many UI and UX designers use it to create wireframes for software products to create effective layouts and workflow. Many companies like it’s ease of use and I like it too and have used it in the past for quick mockups. While Sketchflow is way more interactive, sometimes people just want to get wireframe concepts down on paper. For this it is quite capable. Since it’s so popular, there are many extra “controls” and mock-ups in Balsamiq format out there (in BMML XML).
Balsamiq Mockups has a growing community of programmers, designers, product managers and usability experts who are passionate about creating software and web sites that delight users every day.
This page highlights some community tools and websites which might be useful to you.
Community UI Controls
Wouldn’t it be great if these tools could work together and you could use the same components with both? Well a very exciting community project is being worked on in Codeplex looks like this is a serious possibility.. That would give us the ability to work with both products and have transportability between UI component formats..
You can find this project at:
http://mockuptoxaml.codeplex.com/
If you can spare sometime it looks like they are looking for more developers to join the project..
UPDATE!
Sketchables by Philipp Sumi
My friend (and Microsoft Blend Alchemist Laurent Bugnion) just turned me on to this piece of software. It looks very worth checking out as well.. It is a simple framework complemented by a set of controls that allow you to quickly create common controls in a matter of seconds. WOW! With all of these productivity gains there is no reason why you wouldn’t want to make Sketchflow your main prototyping and wire framing platform..
I’d also like to thank Daniel Chaim Robbins, Unni, Jeff, Dante, Celso, Billy, and Rick and the whole Blend team for their amazing work on these controls. WOW you guys this is so AWESOME you have again inspired me and gave me a tool with MASSIVE improvements. To do this release after release is incredible..