Dynamic Prototyping with SketchFlow in Expression Blend: Sketch Your Ideas...and Bring Them to Life! [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

First of all, let me say, I think Sketchflow is amazing. Also, this book makes it clear that you can do very sophisticated things with the Blend UI before you have to slow down and code. Now for the very bad news.

This book held out ambitious promise. It promises to present how to use Sketchflow as a disciplinary backbone as you step through the sketching and prototyping phase of making things, such as software. And, I still believe Sketchflow can do that. But this book is a cut and paste catastrophe. You can literally see how they cut and pasted but did not fix sentences. The absence of the article "a" in very key places, was very distracting. Then in one caption there were additional "a"s. Critical words were left out of sentences, too. Explanations often complicated things that are just simple steps. You're designers! Don't you know when your work gets in the way of affordance? I hate it when tech doc writers think they're writing literature or even non-fiction and don't just number their steps. They're probably scarred they won't look smart if they do that. But smart tech writing is making functional users fast. (Lot's of Microsoft Blend blogs number steps and avoid Dynamic Prototyping's paragraphical convolutions). Luckily, I opened up Sketchflow and did a project before learning how to use it! So, I recognized, eventually, that they were attempting to explain something the UI just made very obvious on first use. STEPS!

I'd imagine I'm the only guy to ever make it to page 325 out of around 500, because there are no negative reviews. I also know a lot of people just read and don't do the hands on exercises.

I could forgive the writing sophomoricities, the worlds' darkest, tiniest screenshots, and stylish paragraphs that obscurred the steps, if the project steps, and the project files were actually correct. But, get this, a majority of the time, you are directed to project filenames that are different than those in the folder for that particular chapter. I reversed engineered. I set up my own files from scratch. I rewrote their sentences until I knew what they were trying to say, and I went into the actual code to fix things. During a chapter on data management, after hours of frustration, I found a blog promising to perform the same tasks. It had 3 times as many steps, because it ran for the code, but it all worked perfectly! Is that how you learn to do projects in expression blend? Random blogs?

This book and I are like a couple in an abuse cycle. I'd finally finish a chapter badly bruised and wondering if "this was it". And then the next chapter's introductory paragraphs would get my hopes up and the honeymoon was back on. An ever-so-brief honeymoon, abruptly ending when I'd try to open the next project file, or would follow the books steps which turned out to be wrong, and again I was fighting back, web-searching, blog reading, re-reading the paragraphs, restarting the files, failing back to older files, reinstalling the files, etc.

My friends keep telling me to give it up, and keep asking me why I can't seem to stop myself. But there are not plenty of fish in the sea. In fact, I've gone through a couple of much better written Blend books and the author's jump off into the code long before the UI requires it. Like, "How to make a button." Why would you want to know how to code a button to learn states, etc? Nobody does that. Blend comes with tons of buttons that can be easily customized. It's because the authors don't know how to use the UI to build cooler things than buttons, presuming that I will know how to take that button coding information and make really cool RIAs, really quickly without using the Blend UI--which is a contradiction in terms. This book at least excels at avoiding code to do what the UI can already do. It just fails to successfully present how they did it! Don't buy it. Find a better way to learn it, and then share it with me!

The last work files in the final chapters, where you're bringing it all together, WON'T EVEN LOAD in Blend 4. I don't know if it's a file compatibility issue, or what. By the time I was loading those, I'd quit reading the chapters becuase previous files were failing. Tragic. I'm puting it in the bookshelf tonight, the margins filled with my notes of frustration. "File didn't have this name. When I loaded the one that IS there, half the execises had already been performed on it", etc.

It's the only book of it's kind, and it doesn't work. So sad.

The well spoken wisened Bill Buxton wrote the preface. Bill, you're brilliant, your influence on how Blend and Sketchflow are built is fantastic. But why didn't you try the book's exercises before you associated yourself with it? You're why I bought it! I love your books, but in the future, please take the time to test technical books before you cost me[...] and 20 hours of frustration. Why is your time so much more important than my time, and the time of all the people who buy this book because of your endorsement?

First, let me begin by saying this book is awesome, it really is a sterling book. Second, let me say this is an example of a sterling book that got slammed by bad execution, many typo's and examples that don't work. I have to still give this book a 4 though because it really taught me everything I needed to know about getting into sketchflow.

There is so much extra knowledge gained from this book outside of just sketchflow that it warrants a spot on my "top books" shelf. The authors trully know the system and you feel like you're getting somewhere. However, I'm a devigner (developer / designer) with 2 decades of hard core coding and designing under my belt which allowed me to overlook all their mistakes. Other reviewers have already mentioned them all so I won't go into details. Also, the last part of the book where you actually design a system using their examples is severly flawed, there are a number of files in the zips that are 0 byte files which is the reason the projects don't load but by this time I was already seasoned in sketchflow and merely read through the text and ignored the examples. The first parts prior to this work just fine however which is really all you need.

Therefore, my closing comment would be, if you're a seasoned developer AND designer you'll be able to make it through this book and will find it invaluable as I haven't found a better book on Blend 3 with Sketchflow 1 (I'm on Blend 4 with Sketchflow 2 though), it just doesn't exist right now. But once better books come out (there's a few coming out within the next two months) you'll hopefully have something better which is why it gets a 4 instead of a 2.

I really wanted to give this book a 5 star rating because it really helped me become comfortable using SketchFlow. But, as other reviewers have mentioned it is sometimes difficult to follow the examples because the steps are unclear, or the resources are difficult to find. The addendum on their website fixes most of these issues but not all. I was still able to figure out all of the examples thanks to the finished projects that you can download from the books website, but the frustration encountered when trying to follow some of the examples is why I grudgingly gave this a 4 rather than a 5.

Also, I used Expression Studio 4 and I was very happy to discover that they provide all of the projects for the book for both version 3 and version 4 of expression studio.

Developer's perspective: I am a developer and have no formal education or experience with design. I got interested in SketchFlow because I needed a good way to prototype my projects and we do not have a designer where I work so the design of my projects also falls to me. The first 3 chapters are geared towards design in general and they talk alot about things that you would probably have learned if you went to a school of design. While I found these chapters to be very boring there was some useful information regarding how to go about designing a solution and the stages that a prototype will go through. Apart from that this book is completely accessible to developers who sometimes get thrust into design and prototyping and need to learn a good tool for that purpose.

If you need a book that focuses on SketchFlow do not be afraid to get this book. Though there are still a few places where the examples are hard to follow you can work through these, and the book does an excellent job of getting you up to speed using SketchFlow.