Here’s another small update to Paul Thurrott’s Windows Phone 8. This one adds a few more screenshots and a small section about using Favorites in the Photos hub to customize the hub’s tile and background.
I’m back from vacation and will be working more on the book this week. This update’s additions necessitated an update to the table of contents, since the new screenshots and section changed the page numbering. This was itself an interesting test, and it was very easy to do.
The next step is to figure out how/where to add information about two key areas, one of which was previously known:
Nokia HERE apps. I’m going to cover Nokia HERE Maps and Nokia HERE Drive/Drive+ explicitly in the book. The question is how the Maps bit, especially, impacts the Bing Maps coverage that is already there. I’ll be looking at covering both together, but if that doesn’t make sense, I may push the Bings Maps stuff into an appendix or something and just focus on the Nokia HERE stuff, since everyone can get it and the app is preinstalled on 80 percent of Windows Phone 8 handsets.
Bing and Bing apps. Microsoft announced recently that it is significantly changing the Bing experience on Windows Phone, and that will impact the Search chapter whenever that update appears on my phones. In concert with this, Microsoft has also released four Bing apps—News, Weather, Finance, and Sports—that in some ways replace (and in many ways enhance) functionality that was originally in the Bing experience. So the question is whether I add information about those apps to the Search chapter (perhaps as just a mention), or create a new apps section in the Store chapter (which, not coincidentally was originally called Store + Apps) and include that info there.
Once I figure that all out, I have to actually write and insert that material of course. Most likely I can just write it first and figure out how it fits in afterwards. So maybe these updates will be created “outside” of the book for a bit. I’ll probably know more soon.
In the meantime, here’s that minor update. Feedback is always appreciated.
Download Paul Thurrott's Windows Phone 8 1.02 (651 page PDF, 40.1 MB)
