It's been a big week for "Windows 8.1 Book" from a content perspective: The book has jumped from 388 pages a week ago to 426 pages today, with much of the new content coming from an in-progress chapter about the Bing apps.
Remember, we're charging just $2 for the book, and you can contribute in other ways as well. Check out my earlier post Buy Windows 8.1 Book! or the Windows 8.1 Book web site for the details.
Looking at milestones, we started actively writing the book in mid-September, so we're averaging about 100 pages per month. I suspect that the 1.0 version of the book—possibly finished in the next 3-4 weeks if we're lucky—will be over 500 pages, but of course we'll keep going from there. The big deal with 1.0 is that that version of the book will head out to the Kindle and Nook stores.
This week's updates (with the newest posts at the top) include:
Here is a sixth (!) update to the BING APPS chapter for "Windows 8.1 Book." In this version, I've stopped differentiating between what I was calling "the Bing content apps"—Bing Finance, Food & Drink, Health & Fitness, News, Sports and Travel—and Bing Maps because they actually all share much commonality. So they're just Bing apps now, and Bing Maps will be placed in the center of the chapter and not appended to the end.
Here is new update to the BING APPS chapter for "Windows 8.1 Book." This one includes a new section about Bing Finance (though I have one sub-section to add later) and includes a reconstruction of the chapter flow that actually reduces page count. Which is fine: There was too much repetition previously.
Here is another update to the BING APPS chapter for "Windows 8.1 Book." This one includes the sections about Bing News and Bing Travel.
This third look at the BING APPS chapter for "Windows 8.1 Book" includes coverage of the Bing News app and removes the Modern Utilities section. As with the other sections that will appear for each Bing content app, the Bing News section focuses on useful features, especially those that aren't immediately obvious.
With "Windows 8.1 Book" finally hitting the 400 page mark, I thought it may be useful to provide a quick progress report. Back in mid-September 2013, Rafael and I started working on the book, but it wasn't until early November that we formally launched this site with Welcome to Windows 8.1 Book! We used that post to establish our goals for the book and explain our plans, and if you want to view that as a cute self-motivational technique, I think there's some validity to that.
Here is a second quick look at the BING APPS chapter for "Windows 8.1 Book." This update is somewhat minor from an actual content perspective, but it does add two key bits: A list of possible topics for each Bing content app and a completed section about Bing Weather.
Here is a first look at the BING APPS chapter for "Windows 8.1 Book." This chapter focuses on the various Bing content apps in Windows 8.1—Bing Finance, Food & Drink, Health & Fitness, News, Sports and Travel—plus Bing Maps. For now, I've blocked a section for the Modern utility apps that are included as well, but could be broken out into another chapter.
