Creating WP7 prototypes with Sketchflow

With the upcoming release of Windows Phone Mango, you can create prototypes for Phone apps with Sketchflow. For people not knowing Sketchflow : it allows you to create prototypes that look like they have been drawn. When you present a “normal” prototype to a customer you get conversations like this :

Nice protoype, how long before you can deliver us the final product ?

I estimate we can deliver within 4 months.

What ? You created this prototype in just 3 days, it looks like it’s almost finished. How can it possibly take 4 months for completing ?

A sketchflow prototype looks more “unfinished”. It’s not new, it has been around for WPF and silverlight, but you can now also get the projecttemplate for WP7 for using in Blend. Just go to http://wp7sketchflow.codeplex.com/, download and install. Beware : you can only use this thing if you have the full paid version of Blend. The one you get for free with the phone developers tool will not do.

OK. Let’s open up Blend and create a Windows Phone SketchFlow application :