Naming the Books

I think I’ve finally settled on the brand I’ll use for the books and book series I’m writing and will continue to write going forward. That said, I do need a bit of help clarifying the exact names.

I mentioned previously that I liked the notion of “pocket” and “guidebooks,” and the general travel theme, using the Rick Steves series of travel books as an obvious inspiration. With that in mind, I looked at whether terms like “Field Guide” (for full length books) or “Pocket Field Guide” (for “mini-books”) were in uses as series names for major tech books. After all, I also don’t want to step on any traditional publishers’ toes and use terms like “Secrets” or “In & Out”.

They’re not. So my basic plan is to use “Field Guide” for the full-length titles and “Pocket Field Guide” for the mini-books.

The question is what form this would take.

Using three representative books as examples—Amazon Cloud Player Book, Xbox Music Book and Windows Phone Book—I started looking at how these might fit into the brand names and what the actual book titles would be.

One obvious approach is to use my name in there, though I’m worried that makes the titles too long and puts the topic too far back in the title:

Paul Thurrott's Field Guide to Windows Phone 8
Paul Thurrott's Pocket Field Guide to Xbox Music
Paul Thurrott's Pocket Field Guide to Amazon Cloud Player

(Here, “to” might be replaced with “for,” as in “Paul Thurrott's Field Guide for Windows Phone 8.”)

Two obvious shorter variants emerge as well:

Field Guide to Windows Phone 8
Pocket Field Guide to Xbox Music
Pocket Field Guide to Amazon Cloud Player

Windows Phone 8 - A Field Guide
Xbox Music - A Pocket Field Guide
Amazon Cloud Player - A Pocket Field Guide

(You could tack “by Paul Thurrott” on to the end of any of these if the absence of my name bugs you. But I think I prefer shorter over longer titles.)

Anyway, that’s where I’m at. Thoughts and feedback are appreciated. 

Update: I’ve gotten enough feedback about the brands to reconsider the use of my name in the title.

Maybe…

Paul Thurrott's Guide to Windows Phone 8
Paul Thurrott's Pocket Guide to Xbox Music
Paul Thurrott's Pocket Guide to Amazon Cloud Player

Games 0.1

Here’s a first peek at the Games chapter for Windows Phone Book. In this early version of the chapter you’ll find a rough layout of the expected tasks and a few completed sections.

As with the previous two chapters, Email and Internet Explorer, this one looks to be quite straightforward and should be completed very quickly and with little effort. My guess is that this will be one of the shortest chapters in the book, too, since it deals mostly with peripheral material related to gaming, and not to game-playing.

One thing I’m not sure about is how to handle Xbox SmartGlass. From a gaming perspective, it seems that most of SmartGlass’s usefulness is related to Xbox 360 games, and not Windows Phone games, so perhaps only a cursory overview is required. On the other hand, if anyone knows about any excellent two-screen games that work on both Xbox 360 and Windows Phone and interact in some amazing way, I’ll consider adding information about that.

So far, only a few sections are done: Find and launch the Games hub, Tour of the Games hub, Send and respond to friend requests, and Customize the Games hub. But given the size of topic list, this chapter is possibly one-third complete in first draft form. (That said, it’s possible the introductory material about Xbox LIVE and accounts will be lengthy, and I may need to add a section at the end about managing your account online. We’ll see how that goes.)

Feedback is always appreciated.

Download Games 0.1

Download Windows Phone Book 0.027

Next Chapter: Games

I spent a bit of time developing a structure for the next chapter, Games, yesterday. No serious writing yet, so I’ll wait a day or two on the first release. But I wanted to quickly step through how I see this one going.

First, this should be one of the shortest chapters in the book. Most of the game-related activities that occur on Windows Phone occur in the games themselves, and I won’t be writing about individual games.

Second, I’m not sure if I want/need to cover Xbox SmartGlass in this chapter. From a game-playing perspective, SmartGlass so far doesn’t offer much. Yes, you can interact in small ways with Xbox 360-based games. But even second screen titles—of which I don’t believe there are any yet—don’t have much to do with gaming on the phone per se. I’m curious if anyone has thoughts about that. I’ll leave it in for now.

Here’s a rough structure of what I have so far:

Understand Xbox LIVE

Get additional Xbox Games apps

  - Xbox Extras and Xbox SmartGlass

Find and launch the Games hub

Tour of the Games hub

Find games in Xbox Games Store

  - Free, Try, Buy – link to Apps/Store chapter

Play games

  - Xbox LIVE games vs. other games

  - Send and receive game requests

View and configure your online persona

  - Avatar – poke him tip

  - Gamertag

  - Gamerscore

  - Achievements

  - Launch Xbox Extras to customize your avatar

Interact with your Xbox friends

  - See friends that are online

  - Read and respond to a message

  - Send a new message

  - Send and receive friend requests

Customize the Games hub

I should be able to post the first release in the next day or so. I expect this one to happen quickly.

Internet Explorer Chapter is Complete

Well. That was quicker than even I expected: I had a couple of extra hours to kill today, so I used them finish the first draft of Chapter 11, Internet Explorer.

This third update to the Internet Explorer chapter fills out the following sections

• (Short) introduction
• Tour of IE Mobile
• Share information from web pages
• Watch a YouTube video

I also moved some stuff around (like the Save a picture from a web page section) and added a few more bits here and there (like the web keyboard and progress bar info in the navigation section).

As always the word “complete” has quotes around it; this is never really complete. But I think it’s in a pretty good place and will be moving on to other chapters.

Feedback is always appreciated.

Download Internet Explorer 0.3

Download Windows Phone Book 0.026

Internet Explorer 0.2

Here’s a second update to the Internet Explorer chapter for Windows Phone Book. This update adds three sections of content to what is proving to be a very straightforward chapter that is now about two-thirds complete.

The following sections have been added in this update:

• Tabs (including access tabs, delete a tab, create a new tab, open a link in a new tab, access tabs from the address bar, and open links from other apps in a new tab)
• Recent (including access Recent, manage recent sites)
• Favorites (including access Favorites, edit a Favorite, delete a Favorite, add a web page to Favorites, access Favorite web pages from the address bar, and access Favorites from the address bar button)
• Pin a web page to the Start screen

I’d guess this chapter is about two-thirds complete (in first draft form, that is). What’s left? Sections like the introduction, UI tour, sharing, and watch a YouTube video. Should be quick: Like email, this topic is very straightforward.

Feedback is always appreciated.

Download Internet Explorer 0.2

Download Windows Phone Book 0.025