Friday, January 30, 2004 |
16:16 - Hey! Me too!
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0672326124/qid=1075507781/sr=1-2/ref=s
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Woo-hoo! It's here!
And it sure did take its sweet time, huh? Panther was released in late October, and within a couple of weeks David Pogue already had a book out on it. How in the name of high holy hell did he write it so fast? Especially since the UI wasn't ready for screenshots until early October at the latest? That's why I had no fewer than three weeks' work beyond the release date just trying to get all the screenshots done. Now, the Apple Stores all have Panther books of all types, from this series and that series, and even one from another series by the same publishing company as mine. (Huh?!) I'm jostling for space, instead of being first out of the gate.
But if there's one lesson I'm learning from all this, it's that the world of Mac tech publishing moves very damned fast. Why, a few days ago-- not two weeks after iLife '04 was released-- O'Reilly published a 56-page PDF pamphlet on iLife '04 which is freely downloadable. It's instant documentation! Quite an industry we got here.
I'd originally submitted a TOC with 33 chapters; after I'd written and submitted them all, I was told that it came in at nearly 700 pages, and there was a hard 500-page limit. Besides which, as I was unaware, there's an iLife in a Snap book being done at the same time by another author, and it covers everything four of my chapters did, in yet more detail. So I had to combine those four chapters into one big mega-chapter on iLife, liberally spattered with references to the other book, and covering only the high points of the (then) four iApps-- which still entails quite a lot. (I also had to cram in things like QuickTime and image conversion and DVD playback into that chapter, which is about the only place they fit.) After all the hacking and slashing and consolidating and wholesale culling, I was down to 19 chunky chapters straining at the seams of the covers.
I just got my copy last night, and it ended up looking a lot better than I'd dared hope. It's very densely packed; they got it down to 600 pages (that's 600 exactly, including the insides of the front and back covers, which have actual content on them), and the illustrations came out nice and bold. Capri is featured front and center on lots of pages, as are various friends.
It's my first solo, and I think I'll pop me a Diet Coke in celebration. Huzzah!
Oh: The woman on the front? I believe her name is Joanne Royalty Free.
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