Sunday, December 23, 2012 at 6:34PM I probably won't have enough to post for a day or two, but the next chapter will be Chapter 14: Music, Videos and Podcasts. Should be an interesting test of my "write-less" mantra given the amount of potential content here.
More soon...
Sunday, December 16, 2012 at 1:24PM Here are the updated versions of each first draft chapter and the book.
Download Bing Search and Maps 0.9
Also, towards the end of the book writing process, I'm going to expand the PC integration chapter to include devices, like NFC speakers, Bluetooth headsets, car integration, and so on. This was the original goal for the chapter, not sure how that got cut out.
Sunday, December 16, 2012 at 1:05PM I post too quickly. :)
After hitting "Save" on that last post, I figured out a few other ways to change consolidate the TOC. (And oddly, I expanded it in one way as well.)
This time, I've cut it down to 20 chapters and combined further. Personalization and Sharing are no longer separate chapters but are now covered in the introduction to Metro chapter. The previous separate Getting Started and Understanding Your New Phone sections are just one section, Getting Started, with three chapters. I moved the migrating from iOS and Android chapter to the very end since it's almost an appendix type thing.
As for that addition: I'm going to cover Nokia apps in the utility apps chapter since so many Windows Phone 8 users will have Nokia devices and many of them are excellent and platform differentiators.
OK. I'll stop tweaking the TOC for a while. Getting to the 20 chapter point was somehow satisfying. I will renumber and repost the current chapters and Book soon.
The new TOC...
Getting Started
1. Why Windows Phone? Include Choosing the Right Handset
2. Windows Phone and Accounts
3. Metro: The Windows Phone User Experience – Include personalization and sharing
More Than a Phone
4. You and Your Friends: Me and the People Hub
5. Phone, Skype and VoIP
6. Messaging
7. Bing Search and Maps
8. Windows Phone Store and Apps
Productivity Apps
9. Email
10. Calendar
11. Browsing the Web with Internet Explorer
12. Office + OneNote
13. Windows Phone Utility Apps – Microsoft and Nokia
Entertainment and Games
14. Music, Videos, and Podcasts
15. Photos – Camera, Photos hub
16. Games
Taking It to the Next Level
17. Integrating with PCs and devices
18. Security and Networking – Includes Kid’s Corner and Wallet
19. Windows Phone at Work: Business Features
20. Migrating from Android or iOS
Sunday, December 16, 2012 at 12:54PM After finishing the rough first draft of the PC Integration chapter yesterday, I took at a look at the table of contents (TOC) to figure out what to write next. My goal is to write a few of the shorter chapters first, just to churn through "more" of the TOC, if that makes sense, and make some progress. But I've been thinking that much of what I've written is perhaps too comprehensive and that if I want this to be less than 1000 pages long, I need to think seriously about cutting back across the board. I need to write less, and get this done more quickly.
I will likely revisit the first chapters I've written with that in mind. But before doing that, I figured I'd look at the TOC and see if there any obvious places to cut. Serendipitously, the Kid's Corner and Security and Networking chapters could clearly be combined, so I removed the old Chapter 22 (about Kid's Corner) and made a note to myself to cover that in the old Chapter 24 (Security and Networking). This means that the PC Integration chapter is now Chapter 22, and the revised TOC looks like this:
Getting Started
1. Why Windows Phone?
2. Choosing the Right Handset
3. Windows Phone and Accounts
4. Migrating from Android or iOS
Understanding Your New Phone
5. Metro: The Windows Phone User Experience
6. Personalizing Windows Phone
7. Sharing with Others
More Than a Phone
8. You and Your Friends: Me and the People Hub
9. Phone, Skype and VoIP
10. Messaging
11. Bing Search and Maps
12. Wallet
13. Windows Phone Store and the Apps Ecosystem
Productivity Apps
14. Email
15. Calendar
16. Browsing the Web with Internet Explorer
17. Office + OneNote
18. Windows Phone Utility Apps
Entertainment and Games
19. Music, Videos, and Podcasts
20. Photos – Camera, Photos hub
21. Games
Taking It to the Next Level
22. Integrating with PCs and devices
23. Security and Networking – Includes Kid’s Corner
24. Windows Phone at Work: Business Features
That's not a big cut. So I'll continue looking at ways to cut back and make the book more manageable, not just for me while writing it but for future readers. (Maybe Chapters 1 and 2 are combined, for example. In fact, yeah. I'll do that next.)
More soon.
Saturday, December 15, 2012 at 6:05PM The first draft of the PC Integration chapter is now complete. This version includes a few clean-ups, and I removed a section on PC/phone NFC integration. (Looking at how NFC is implemented in Windows 8, it's not clear that this will ever actually work. If it does, I'll add it back.)
I'll move on to new content tomorrow.