After a tumultuous week, I am happy and relieved to report that Windows Everywhere is finally available for purchase on Leanpub. It’s still not exactly where I want it, but it’s at least the whole book as it currently stands, and not a subset.
Apologies for the drama earlier this week. It’s fair to say that I was in a spiral of desperation on Wednesday after two straight days of technical issues trying to get the book into shape for publication. And that testing things with Rafael the next day really helped me, especially to reassure me that the fault was Leanpub and not me.
Friday morning I woke up to a series of emails from Leanpub. They had identified two issues with the publishing system for the last system (the one we are using now) and fixed them both. And not to oversimplify things, part of the fix involved giving the books four times more server resources than before when previewing and publishing. Long story short, it worked: I was able to perform successful (and correct) full and partial previews of the book on Friday, setting the stage for a public rollout.
Before that could happen, however, I had to finish some detail work for the book. Most of these items were backend items that aren’t particularly interesting. But a part can be interesting. For example, since the book was going to come into the world in a ‘complete’ state – more details below, I wanted to do this with a cover. As you may know, the Windows 11 Field Guide doesn’t have a cover design yet, but this book isn’t finished yet, so there’s no rush.
I wasn’t sure what I wanted for the cover of Windows Everywhere look like it, and to be fair, I’ll probably never be satisfied with it anyway. But my branding work for the Eternal Spring YouTube channel that my wife and I created led me down a path where the bold title style we used in the video morphed (which I think be) into a cool logo in which you can see an image inside the text of the Eternal Spring letters. And I thought maybe something like this would make sense to Windows Everywhereperhaps using a current or classic Microsoft/Windows font.
This effect, where you can see an image inside the letters, is called masking and I do it so rarely in Photoshop Elements that I research how to do it every time it comes up. So I endured a long struggle of several minutes before finally deciding to see if this process was easier in Affinity Photo. And of course it’s stupid and easy, and something I’ll never forget now. So I got to work.
What I found is quite amusing. I ended up using a Windows XP-inspired “Bliss” wallpaper that’s free for commercial use (and while I haven’t yet, I’ll credit the creator of the book soon). And I used a contemporary Microsoft font, Segoe UI, for the text, squishing and stretching each instance to get the look I wanted (similar to what I did with Eternal Spring), and each having the same width.
After some back and forth, I then decided to add a four-quadrant square that also echoes the Microsoft and Windows logos. I still don’t know if it’s too big, but it can be changed quite easily. Just like the whole design, really.
And… then I kind of sat on it. After all this work, and knowing that there were still things to do, I wasn’t sure I was going to live with it. So I left it unedited last night.
This morning I again went through all the Leanpub back-end forms related to the book to make sure the description, prices, etc. were correct. And then I wrote a little note to the first buyers, explaining that the book was “complete”, but that there would be changes and content additions. The book, at the time, was 993 pages, as I had kept it in most pictures.
Then I clicked publish. Gut check time.
The book went live about a minute later and is now available on Leanpub for $9.99+ with a suggested price of $29.99.
But I hadn’t finished tinkering. After 40 minutes of walking and eating breakfast, I used Visual Studio Code, which can open and act on a folder of files with almost alarming ease, to make corrections throughout the book. (I saved the folder first, of course.) For example, there was a mishmash of smart and stupid quotes, of the ” and ” variety, throughout the book, so I made a search and replace (CTRL + SHIFT + H ) and turned them all into dumb quotes in two quick and efficient passes. Bam.
During my first two editing passes (during the second of which I also added all the images), I had discovered that the characters I needed to use in Word to generate an em dash in WordPress “-” were creating instances of an em dash and a normal dash right next to each other. And because I use it a lot, they were all over the book. So I fixed that too. In like two seconds. Bam. (This is/was a problem in the Windows 11 Field Guide Also. Fixed! Bam.)
With that out of the way, I previewed and then re-published the book.
Looking through the PDF version of the book, however, I discovered that chapter “7”, which of course discusses Windows 7, has no images. And that’s because it was one of many chapters in which I had removed images after adding them; Alphabetically, 7.md is the first file in the chapter of the book, and I started deleting images because I thought it would fix the issues I was having earlier in the week. I had reversed the other chapters since then, but apparently missed this one. So I re-added the image references, re-previewed and reposted. And with those additions, the book was…exactly 1000 pages. He h.
I didn’t need this reminder to move on to my next task, which was to reduce the size of the images in the book in an effort to reduce the page count and file size. I had dealt with this with the Windows 10 field guide at one point moving most frames from 100% to 75%, and it worked well with this title. So the moment I switched to the Windows 11 Field GuideI just used 75% for most images.
With Windows Everywhere, however, most of the frames were at 100%, and I also have a few frames at 40, 50, 60, and 70%. I left most of them alone, but again used Visual Studio Code – seriously, how wonderful – to change the 100% frames to 80%, thinking that would do the trick. Then I reviewed the book, waited a bit and checked what the impact was.
943 pages. I had only reduced it by 57 pages. It is not enough. I was hoping for 150-200 page savings. Well.
And that means I’ll have to do what I always knew I should do, and reduce the number of images in the book. There are simply too many. I will start this process soon, but it will take some time. We are returning from Mexico City next Thursday and I am sure this work will continue long after.
As I have written before, I will also update the contents of the book over time. (Thus, the quotes around “full” above.) This will happen via content additions to the existing story, since I’ve glossed over some topics that may deserve more discussion. And I’ll write about the eras of Windows 10 and 11, and possibly end it on some sort of “AI into the future” note. We will see.
For now, I’m just glad all the hard work is there for the world to see. And while I’m not very comfortable promoting myself per se, there’s no better way to support myself than to buy this book and my other books, because it affects me directly. And so I hope you will consider buying the book. If not, remember it’s also available in its original form as a programming window series here on Thurrott.com. (And I’ll update the series when I add content to the book as well, of course.)
Thanks for reading. Getting to this point has been an incredible journey of many years.
