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December 04, 2006
Napkins considered harmful
Napkins considered harmful: Interesting development in comments at Robert Scoble's blog, about MS Expression/Wpf/E... the emphasis here is on the ability to quickly prototype and test ideas, and then use the prototype code as final deliverable code. If the prime directive is to reuse all proof-of-concept work, then wouldn't drawing on a napkin be verboten, unless you later scanned it in to finish off as final artwork? I don't agree that ideas should only be expressed in the final deliverable medium... sketches, storyboards, mockups, prototypes, proofs-of-concept, wireframes, component RAD, all of these are valid options, I think. (While walking home, I realized Robert's main argument doesn't hold up... "Avalon was all Macromedia Director and C++ couldn't do that so now we'll be all-XAML" means that the next OS would always be a version behind, or else would be designed on a live and changing codebase... doesn't make sense to me either way.)
Posted by JohnDowdell at December 4, 2006 09:21 PM
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As someone who is currently involved in a large-scale WPF project, I agree that prototypes cannot magically be "tuned" into the finished product. Even if someone wanted to do that, it just isn't realistic. Of course code can be migrated over and things like that but most prototypes are fairly awful when it comes to coding :-)
Posted by: Lee Brimelow at December 4, 2006 10:36 PM
Scoble's main point seemed to be that Flash was not an appropriate design tool for building *Windows* application interfaces, and I think you'd have to agree that he's right. Otherwise we would have seen *Windows* apps with Flash functionality long ago. Instead Adobe has taken on projects that will deliver Flash-enabled experiences on multiple devices, while WPF seems to be solely concentrated on developing for Windows only. It's hard to see these products as direct competitors in any practical real-world sense. Now, which platform--Windows only or the cross-platform, cross-device network dependent model that Adobe is buying into--seems to be where the real competition lies.
Posted by: Kim Cavanaugh at December 5, 2006 03:07 AM
Lee, I agree... Mitch Tenderson put it better than me, in a comment over in Robert's thread: "If you think prototyping is going away you don't understand its role in development. The time-consuming part of developing a UI is not converting the prototype to real code, it's developing and testing the prototype. Coming up with a good design is the hard part, writing the corresponding code is easy."
Sometimes writing a second draft makes more sense than editing the initial wording... same principle, yes?
Kim, I frequently seem to miss Robert's main points... my initial question was actually about using Adobe Flash Player as the runtime engine instead of trying to create and support another multiplatform clientside engine, and Robert's answer on development issues switched me over into talking about classic Director-based prototyping there, which I then summarized as "napkins considered harmful" here. Different issues lumped together, agreed.
Posted by: John Dowdell at December 5, 2006 06:50 AM
What I got from the article was, "Using Flash & Director, you can show some amazing things. Those amazing things are impossible to do in Windows. Thus, you need to prototype instead in Blend. Things created in Blend CAN be done in Windows."
[jd sez: Ouch!! ;-) ]
Posted by: JesterXL at December 5, 2006 07:14 AM