A Second Update to the Music, Videos and Podcasts Chapter

Last week, I posted a very early version of the “Music, Videos, and Podcasts” chapter for Windows Phone Book, noting that it would soon change quite a bit. And it has, for reasons both anticipated and unexpected.

To recap where I’m at here, I had started writing “Windows Phone Book” last fall to try and change the way I write books. I chose Windows Phone 8 as the topic because I love Windows Phone and figured this would be a nice gift for users. (Windows Phone Book will always be free.) But as I discovered plowing through this enormous topic, it’s hard to experiment with new ways of publishing when writing that book takes so much time. So I took a detour into shorter topics, first with Amazon’s music services and then with Xbox Music, the latter of which I now think of as Xbox Music Book.

I had a related if belated epiphany of sorts with Xbox Music Book, realizing that the “narrative” writing style I’d been using was too ponderous, especially for the lengthier Windows Phone Book. So I’ve switched to a task-based approach in which, at least by plan, there will be short narrative explanations of what’s going on followed by a list of concise, digestible tasks. The goal is to prevent Windows Phone Book from being an unmanageable and perhaps unfinishable 1,000 page tome.

So. :)

The bad news is I’ll need to rewrite the chapters I’ve previously “completed” (at least in first draft form). The good news is that I was able to very quickly adapt the latest chapter I’d been working on—Music, Videos and Podcasts—to this new format, since it was so early in the process.

I did that this week. That was the “anticipated” part of the changes.

The unexpected part was that I had some pretty ponderous sections in there about copying media to and from the phone, one each for the three sections of the chapter (music, videos, and podcasts). And these sections were all the more tedious since there are three ways to enact these transfers, the Windows Phone app, the Windows Phone desktop application, and File/Windows Explorer. I am embarrassed to admit that in the process of reworking this chapter for the task-based approach I actually wrote significant chunks of text around these tasks when I suddenly realized something.

Transferring media between a Windows Phone handset and a PC isn’t a Windows Phone task at all. It’s a PC task. And I’ve already got a chapter for that: Chapter 17, PC Integration. These tasks should be discussed there, and there only. So I did the right thing, if begrudgingly: I cut them out of the chapter. I saved them in a separate file so I can add them to Chapter 17 when I re-do that chapter (it’s in first draft form now) for the new task-based approach.

What I was left with was a very simply-arranged chapter, with just a few major sections: Tour of the app, Digital music, Digital videos, Podcasts, System integration, and Settings. Nice.

The Digital music part will be adapted from the Windows Phone section of Windows Phone Book, so I’ll do that last. Since last week, I cleaned up Digital videos and adapted it for the task-based style, and wrote most of the Podcasts section. Here’s the updated chapter and book.

Download Music, Videos and Podcasts 0.2

Download Book 0.011

Music, Videos and Podcasts 0.1

In tandem with Xbox Music Book, I’m working on the Music, Videos and Podcasts chapter for Windows Phone Book. Here’s an early and rough peek at that chapter, which consists of some introductory material and the section about using videos with the Music + Videos app in Windows Phone 8.

Note: Going forward I’ll be cross-posting each Windows Phone Book update to the SuperSite for Windows and the Windows Phone Book web site.

What you see here was written before I started working on Xbox Music Book, so it’s written like the previous chapters in Windows Phone Book, i.e. is not task-based. So the next update to this chapter will likely be converted from this format to the new task-based format, and I’m curious to see how well that works. But my expectation is that I can reuse the Windows Phone 8 portions of Xbox Music Book in this chapter.

For now, what we have is some introductory material, the section about using videos on Windows Phone 8, and some basic placeholders that represent the high-level organization of the rest of the chapter. In case, you missed it, it’s not possible (for now, I hope) to access Xbox Video-based video content on Windows Phone 8. That significantly impacts both Windows Phone 8 and this chapter, I think.

Anyway, I should have more soon as the non-Windows Phone content in Xbox Music Book is wrapping up.

Any feedback is appreciated, though of course the chapter is very early in development and will be changing a lot soon.

Download Music, Videos and Podcasts 0.1

Download Book 0.010

Overdue update

Sorry for the lack of updates here. Work did temporarily stop on Windows Phone Book, but I’m ready to pick it back up again. There have been a number of changes, however.

I assume that most people who visit this site also visit the SuperSite for Windows. If not, I floated the idea of doing shorter books there late last year and presented a short “mini-book” (or chapter of a short book) about Amazon Cloud Player, the online retailer’s cloud-based music service. This wasn’t of huge interest to readers of the site, though I’m still personally interested in the topic, so I foisted a second mini-book idea, this time for Xbox Music.

That was better received, and I’ve been working on that in lieu of Windows Phone Book for the past few weeks. That mini-book is why there’s been no progress recently on Windows Phone Book. But Xbox Music Book will impact Windows Phone Book in a second, perhaps more important, way.

As I noted in Xbox Music Book: Another Small Update, a Move to Task-Based Organization, I was originally writing that mini-book in the same way I’d written Windows Phone Book, and most of my previous books, as a narrative. But I tend to overwrite, and one of the things that’s gotten me worried over the first several chapters of Windows Phone Book is the length: This thing is going to be over 1000 pages long—and take a year to write—if I keep doing things as I’ve been doing them.

The point behind the shorter books, however, was to more easily accomplish one of the key goals for this book, which is to not just write another book, but rather to do it differently. And in order to experiment with different with different ways of “publishing” a book—getting it out into the world, and into the hands of readers—I of course need to finish it first.

So.

Thanks to these two side-projects, I’ve come up with a plan that I think makes sense for Windows Phone Book, and will help me better accomplish all of the original goals for this project.

First, I’m going to finish Xbox Music Book first. This shouldn’t take too long, and I will actually be working on Windows Phone Book on the side since I intend to reuse much of the Windows Phone-based content from the mini-book in this book. (I’m currently working on the Music, Video, and Podcasts chapter, not coincidentally.)

Second, I’m going to re-organize Windows Phone Book in two key ways. First, I’m going to use the same task-based approach I’ve changed to for Xbox Music Book, which will make the book shorter, easier to write, and more goal/task-oriented. I won’t abandon narrative completely, of course. There needs to be some “glue” discussions.

Third, I’m examining whether I can finish chunks of this book and maybe publish them separately (Windows Phone Book Part 1, Part 2, and so on) to make it more manageable. Any thoughts on this organization are appreciated.

With regard to the existing, semi-complete/first draft chapters I’ve already written, they will need to be re-written for this new scheme. I will do that over time, not all upfront or all later. I’m curious to see how that looks, to be honest.

And now that Nokia Drive+ Beta is available for non-Nokia Windows Phone 8 handsets for free, I will be adding content about that to the Search and Maps chapter and dropping plans for writing about other Nokia apps.

For the very short term, I want to finish Xbox Music Book. But I’ll be posting some very early versions of the Music, Video, and Podcasts chapter of Windows Phone Book soon as well.

The next chapter: Music, Videos and Podcasts

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...

New chapter and book versions

Here are the updated versions of each first draft chapter and the book.

Download Messaging 0.6

Download Bing Search and Maps 0.9

Download Calendar 0.9

Download PC Integration 0.5

Download Book 0.009

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.