CMAP meeting - Microsoft Sketchflow

I attended tonight's meeting of CMAP (Central Maryland Association of .NET Professionals). They had a presentation on Microsoft's Sketchflow, a prototyping/agile-design tool. I was impressed with the presentation -- I learned more than I expected.

I was less impressed with Sketchflow. It seems to be made for business analysts and designers, allowing people to quickly lay out screens and define the flow from one screen to another. It even uses the "sketchy thing" look that the Art Technology Group had a decade ago, with line drawings of windows and controls.

Yet it fails in major and minor ways. Microsoft gets a lot of the minor details wrong. For example, they spent a great effort on building the sketchy thing look and allowing third party controls to take on the skin. But the sample photos provided by Microsoft are real photos. They stand out like sore thumbs, since every other control is in squiggly lines and the photos are in nice, high-res color. (You can create your own photos and add them, but isn't the tool supposed to save time?)

The major failings are more disturbing. While targeted to analysts and non-programmer users, Sketchflow has a lot of programming details in it. The events for controls have been trimmed, but the general properties remain numerous. So numerous that Microsoft uses the "search" box to find the property you want. (And it works, if you know the name of the property.)

The other failing is the lack of collaboration abilities. Microsoft sticks to the single-user document model, in which every person is working on their own document, or occasionally a copy of someone else's document. To share a Sketchflow model, you must e-mail the file to the recipient who must use a player (or their own copy of Sketchflow) to run it. They can add comments and e-mail the modified file back to you. This is a lot of work for collaboration.

The bottom line: Sketchflow was designed by individually-minded programmers. It will work for an individual but using it in groups will be time-consuming.