First Draft of Phone Chapter is Complete

The first draft of the Phone chapter in Windows Phone Book is complete. As you might expect, this chapter focuses exclusively on the Phone app.

Phone 0.3 adds a number of sections, including a short introduction, Understand the Phone app, Call a phone number from elsewhere in Windows Phone, Understand what happens when you ignore or miss a call, or receive a voice mail, Use a Bluetooth headset, and Customize Phone. Some of these sections are new, late additions.

This chapter was very easy to write and I’m glad to put it behind me and move on to the next chapter. I’m not sure what that will be yet, but I still need to adjust the headings in the People + Me chapter as well.

Feedback is always appreciated.

Download Phone 0.3 (31 page PDF, 2.01 MB)

Download Windows Phone Book 0.040 (425 page PDF, 25.6 MB)

Phone 0.2

Here’s the second update to the Phone chapter in Windows Phone Book. This is a significant update that adds several new sections of content.

As I had hoped, this chapter is proving quite a bit simpler and shorter than the previous chapter, People + Me. I should be able to wrap this one up very quickly and keep forging ahead.

The only caveat to that, again, is the “hands free” phone use/Bluetooth section. I’ll save that to the end, but I think it will still be pretty straightforward. We’ll see.

This update includes two new sections, Call a contact with your voice and Place a conference call, both of which are written. And I’ve written the Access your call history and Handle an incoming call sections. So it’s about 75 percent done, I think. I need to write a bit at the beginning, the “hands free” phone use/Bluetooth section, and the section on configuring Phone and related features (like ringtones).

Feedback is always appreciated.

Download Phone 0.2 (22 page PDF, 1.58 MB)

Download Windows Phone Book 0.039 (416 page PDF, 25.2 MB)

Phone 0.1

Here’s a first peek at the Phone chapter for Windows Phone Book. This first version offers a look at the chapter contents and includes a few finished sections.

Hopefully, this chapter will be more straightforward (and shorter) than the People + Me chapter. So far, that appears to be the case.

I’ve written the sections Understand the Phone app, Manually dial a phone number, Call a contact, and Access your voice mail (which includes several subsections).

The only possible sticking point now involves how deeply to cover “hands free” phone use, with Bluetooth and possibly non-Bluetooth headsets. I guess I’ll figure that out when I get to it.

Feedback is always appreciated.

Download Phone 0.1 (11 page PDF, 1.13 MB)

Download Windows Phone Book 0.038 (405 page PDF, 24.7 MB)

First Draft of People + Me Chapter is Complete

The People + Me chapter for Windows Phone Book is now complete in first draft form. This version of the chapter adds the section about Me, finally, finishing up one of the longer chapters in the book.

Frankly, I consider this chapter something of a setback. I started working on it weeks ago and was sidetracked for a variety of reasons (Boston terrorist attack, work travel), and it’s evolved into one of the longest chapters in the book, certainly the longest of the chapters I’ve written since the switchover to a task-based approach. I had hoped that this new approach would result in shorter chapters that could be written more quickly, and while that was true of the previous few chapters, it wasn’t for this one.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I blew through some of the content in the Me section (and dropped a perhaps-not-superfluous section about the Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter apps.) I’ll be revisiting that later, but at this point I just want to move on.

Likewise, there is a weirdness with the headings in the chapter where the complexity/breadth of the content required H4 headings; I’d like to keep to just H1, H2, and H3 headings, and have a plan to do that, so there will be at least one more post-first draft chapter version. I may just roll that into the wider book document, but we’ll see.

For now, it’s time to look at other chapters and getting to the finish line. I’ve started a bit of Chapter 2, The Windows Phone User Experience, and will likely peck away at that over time, but I think I’m going to write Chapter 6, Phone, next.

Feedback is always appreciated. More soon.

Download People + Me 0.7 (59 page PDF, 5.09 MB)

Download Windows Phone Book 0.037 (395 page PDF, 24.1 MB)

People + Me 0.6

This is a fairly major update to the People + Me chapter for Windows Phone Book. This update completes the big part of the chapter, which is about contacts management.

This update includes the complete, first draft sections about Groups and Rooms, and significantly ups the page count of the chapter, partially because of screenshots, but also because Rooms, in particular, required a lot of text to explain. Part of the goal of the task-based approach is to have shorter chapters, but this one is spinning out of control. I’m not sure what I can do to change that, so I may have to just accept that this is a big topic.

Next up, I’ll fill out the section about “Me,” which is the special feature of the People hub that lets you post to and check up on your social networking accounts.

More soon. As always, any feedback is appreciated.

Download People + Me 0.6 (53 page PDF, 4.41 MB)

Download Windows Phone Book 0.036 (389 page PDF, 23.4 MB)