Calendar 0.8: First draft is complete
Sunday, September 23, 2012 at 11:19AM With the release of Calendar 0.8, in which I’ve completed the final major missing piece (the Mail integration section), the Calendar chapter is “done” for now. That is, I consider this to be the first draft of the Calendar chapter.
It’s not really done of course. You will notice reading through the chapter that there are numerous spots yellow, highlighted text. These can signify the following:
Links. Since this is at heart a live, digital publication, I’d like to have some form of hyperlinking occur throughout the book. So you’ll see links to things like other chapters (“Email” or “Chapter 3: Windows Phone and Accounts”), other sections in the same chapter (“Customizing Calendar”) and so on throughout the chapter. These types of highlights will likely remain in this and future chapters for quite a while, until I figure out the best way to do this linking.
Missing figures. While I’ve added numerous figures (screenshots) to the chapter for illustrative purposes, I’ve also left many uncreated. These are referenced by the highlighted all-caps lines (FIGURE-AGENDA, SELECTION-BOXES, and so on).
Things to verify. I want to make sure I’m using the correct terminology and there are some things I’m not sure about yet (especially the many references to “choosers”). I’ll save that for a later day, but these need to be done at some point before the chapter can be considered complete.
Potential areas of expansion. I’ve marked a few spots that might benefit from further discussion. These will or will not be added later.
Furthermore, since we don’t have a live Windows Phone 8 handset on which to test this chapter against yet, I’ll need to verify that nothing has changed, and that everything is correct. That will come later, of course. Ditto for all of the screenshots, since they will need to be replaced with shots from a real WP8 phone.
This is all very typical for a book, and frankly this chapter is in really good shape for a first draft. I expect only minimal changes later in the process.
I’m a bit surprised that it’s so long, though the figures pad it out additionally. By comparison, I just checked on the Calendar chapter from Windows Phone Secrets—which, no, I did not reference at all in the writing of this chapter—and the differences are interesting. The submitted chapter was 4951 words long, but this new one is already 7200 words long, which is quite a difference. Some of that can be attributed to additional Calendar features in Windows Phone 7.5, I guess. Some of it is likely better familiarity with the system after two and a half years of use. I may read through the Windows Phone Secrets Calendar chapter now to see if there’s anything I’ve missed here, but that would be surprising.
So what’s next?
I’ll probably go over the leaked Joe Belfiore video and presentation to see if there are any more details about Windows Phone 8 that impact the table of contents (TOC). This will be quick, and, I suspect, largely unnecessary, but I want to be sure. Then, I’ll move on to the next chapter. As with this one, I’ll need to stick to something that hasn’t changed much between Windows Phone 7.5 and 8, so I’ll start looking around for an obvious candidate.
Reader Comments (2)
I'm thinking the next chapter will be Maps. Also, just realized I don't really accommodate Bing anywhere in the current TOC.
Hello Paul,
Congratulations on your first chapter!
(I enjoyed seeing it grow - Thanks & well done!)