Jim Minatel's Wrox Book Editor Blog ASP.NET, XML, CSS, Ajax, PHP

This blog has moved: http://p2p.wrox.com/content/blogs/jminatel

I'm happy to say that with the new blog system up and running at p2p.wrox.com, my blogging will now move to http://p2p.wrox.com/content/blogs/jminatel. Please continue to follow me there or to pick up the new RSS feed which is: http://p2p.wrox.com/content/blogs/jminatel/feed

I'll be copying (and updating as needed) a few of the classic blog posts from this Typepad blog (like How to Write a Good Book Proposal for Wrox). And I may archive for posterity some of the more interesting discussions from here (like the new cover comments!). But other than that, the name of my TypePad blog will eventually change to remove the references to Wrox and if I continue to blog here, it will be for non-work posts.

There will also be authors blogging on Wrox.com, we've got several there already and should be adding more constantly. Thanks and I hope to see you at the new blog home.

Are 2009 Smartphones the Equivalent of DOS 6.2?

It's easy to be awed by iPhones, Blackberry's and other smartphones these days, thinking they're the pinnacle of mobile achievement? But then compared to their predecessors, it may be that we've just reached our first base camp on the way to the smart phone summit. I got thinking about this today and saw these parallels:

• Original mobile phones 1980s to mid 1990s compare to 1950-1970 computers and mainframes: they were bulky, power hungry, were mostly considered a luxury
• Mid 1990s to late 2000s phones to 1980s original personal computers: they were both now small enough and widespread to drive the price down. But they were very much still 1 trick ponys. Cell phones could make calls. PCs were running very simple apps, and of course running only 1 at a time. I particularly remember the Compaq 386 the publishing company I was working for at the time ordered for the sales accounting use only. I was so jealous of that machine. But it was mostly used as a souped up basis for Lotus 1-2-3.
• First 1/2 of 2000s phones to early 1990s PCs, prior and the early days of Windows 3.1: PC games, educational utilities, and specialized applications had been around for a while at this point. But if you looked at how people were actually using their PCs, especially in the office and very few people had a home PC at that time, they were running WordPerfect and 1-2-3 (soon to be replaced by Word and Excel).
• The current crop of mobile phones: DOS 6.0 and 6.2X were of course the end of the line for DOS. At the time, Windows versions still required an underlying DOS install and license, OS/2 was dying, and people in the Windows camp were starting to wait for the major advances Windows "Chicago" or Windows 4 would bring us. Connecting to the internet was a pain with a 3rd party TCP/IP stack. But PCs pretty much did what the masses expected them to which had evolved to add some more spiffy gaming, basic messaging although most email/messaging platforms that most people had access to were closed systems. Throw in PowerPoint, Word, and Excel, and most PC users were covered. Most users had no idea what the next few years would bring with widespread internet use, instant messaging, rapidly increasing bandwidth, and all of the ups and downs that came with it.

That's where I think we are with iPhones and Blackberrys today. They're starting to hint at what might be the next giant leap forward. And you might say "but Iphones and blackberrys have web browsers and can install any app" or "the palm pre can run multiple applications." All that's really saying though is that your mobile hone/smart phone now functions like you expect a PC to, except in tiny little mobile package. We haven't had a Tim Berners-Lee for the SmartPhone who brought a whole new vision to the smartphone. But I think we're close.

I wish I could say what that is that's missing. Of course if I new that, I'd probably be busy writing a business plan instead of this blog post.

Updated New and Final Wrox Covers

 

Thanks for all the great feedback on the first round of cover designs, it’s so good to know that we have readers and authors who care so much. I started this post with the cover images above instead of me talking so the covers could speak for themselves.

Most of the feedback we got on the first set of designs revolved around 2 things:

1. Our brand is really tied to the author images and wanting to bring those back
2. Questions about what the images would look like

As far as the author images go, we think the more important issue is author name recognition. The new covers more prominently display author names. The font for author names on front is much larger than the old design and we think better draws attention to the authors. For books with 1 author, or even 2-3 authors, those large names will really pop. The back cover (example below) now features brief bios, also better highlighting author names and expertise. We think that in terms of selling author expertise and in turn selling books, names and bios are more important selling features to most customers. In fact, we hired an outside firm to research the Wrox product, and the research showed that a majority of customers did not know who the people are on the cover or why they were on there. It’s only a small part of the audience who knows authors by how they look. For everyone else, the photos did not help sell books. Yes, we do know there’s a very small number of authors for whom their photo and face are an important part of their personal branding and who are recognized by a decent fraction of their audiences. We hope that by continuing to use their photos with the bios within the book, on wrox.com, and in other promotional material we have a good solution that serves the authors and the audience whether or not they know the author’s face.

Second, yes, there is a theme and it will become more apparent as you see more finished covers. And the theme ties to the user level or type of book. The covers themselves come in 3 primary patterns. The Professional covers as shown above remain mostly red with black and yellow highlights, a very similar color mix to the current covers. Most of the Professional images will relate in some way to speed, faster, efficient, with as one commenter noted, a highlight on the red object with everything else fading to black and white. The Beginning series covers have a mostly white background, a simpler and cleaner look for the Beginning audience with red highlights. Going forward, those images will focus on control, in black and white with red highlights. And Problem Design Solution as well as other books outside Professional and Beginning are more black and yellow with red highlights. And the images for those will feature architecture, again in black and white with red highlights. No, we’re not attempting to tie the contents of the photo to the book topic, not any more than say a series of fish, ladders, or a multitool have to do with ASP.NET. Sometimes a picture is just a picture.

As mentioned in the first post, in addition to the cover look the new covers will be printed on sturdier paper than won’t curl so much. The books themselves are now being printed on a much nicer, whiter paper – something our customers have really been asking for and that’s getting great initial reaction. I’m glad about the reaction to the white paper, which commenters and twitter responses noted as being more important than cover design.

The change from an established brand look is always a difficult step to take. We know we are sacrificing some brand recognition in order to start building something new that we think is better.

John Resig Recommends Wrox Professional JavaScript for Web Developers

Wrox author Nicholas Zakas picked up a very nice recommendation from John Resig today for his Professional JavaScript for Web Developers 2nd edition.In it, after discussing his own upcoming JavaScript Ninja book, John stated:

"If you're looking for a good introductory book to JavaScript and the DOM I strongly recommend Nicholas Zakas' Professional JavaScript Developers book"

I still feel great every time I see a recommendation or good review for any of our books. It's especially good when it comes from someone as respected as John.
I've called Nicholas out in this blog several times for his great work. First about what a great student of publishing he was on his first edition, later what Eric Miraglia at Yahoo! had to say about Nicholas in the foreword for the 2nd edition, and other times in between. And Nicholas wrote a great post a while back telling the story of writing the book and how the proposal came to Wrox and was eventually published.
Thanks again Nicholas for a great book and thanks John, Eric, everyone else who's told someone about Nicholas' great work!

Judging RailsRumble

I was honored to be asked by Jeff Rafter (of Beginning XML fame) to judge this year's RailsRumble. Public voting on the applications that the judges rated highest is still going on through August 30, so if you haven't, get there and rate the top apps. You'll be looking at some incredible apps that were built in 48 hours by a solo developer or teams of up to 4 people. Currently hi.im (it consolidates your various social network identities with one place for people to see who you are on all of them) is leading the public voting, and that was one of the apps I rated highest.

Why was I a judge? I explained to Jeff that I was in no way technically qualified to judge the technical quality of a Rails app. Jeff explained that they had plenty of technical expertise judges and thought I could add some value as an end user app quality/experience judge. Fair enough, and I'd judged contests like this in the past for Microsoft in my days as Exchange & Outlook magazine editor in chief.

One of the other judges, Ben Scofield, wrote a great post about his judging methodology.and he asked other judges to add their thoughts. Ben's post is great. He really did a nice job explaining his credentials (he won the solo division for his apps in this contest the 2 previous years) and what he looked at for each category. I was pleased that some of what I was looking for in the categories matched his descriptions and I encourage you to read his post.

My own peculiarities in judging were:

• I typically judged "innovation" first. Apps that I found innovative and interesting, I spent more time with. Generally speaking the twitter apps ranked low for me in innovation because the field seems so thoroughly covered, although one of my top rated apps was peepnote. Beer social sites also ranked low in innovation for me. Possibly if they're just frameworks or models for some more innovative application, sure but I didn't see that in any of the ones I was asked to rank.
• Next I generally looked at "usefulness" and my criteria here was simply, can I see myself using this a lot or any group of people I know. Again, the twitter apps generally ranked low here, as did the beer apps. The twitter exception was again peepnote but as my comment and their response in the judging was, I'm not sure if I can habitually use a 3rd party twitter site, their usefulness will depend on their successful integration with some of the major twitter apps. I also marked picturizeme (free photo album sharing) as useful (although not innovative of course) and pingmyride (pings a site you specify and sends alerts when it's down) as useful. Again, not innovative but as a simple one trick pony, useful.
• Completeness: OK, here's where the controversy starts and the calls for my judging disqualification and recounts begin: If your site didn't work in IE7/8, I docked hard for completeness. I can see wanting to use forward looking features that are available to 10-20% of the total internet market using Safari/FireFox/etc, but your app isn't complete if it doesn't support IE7/8. I'm fine with dropping IE6 support but you need to support the modern IE versions. Let the name calling and diatribes begin. I'm used to it. (Props to loanit.to for looking for someone which turned out to be me to do a quick IE8 test for them during the build period - and it worked fine. They made the judges cut, they weren't on my judging list though.) Other than that, completeness was easy to judge: if your site did everything it should it was complete, broken links, 404s, etc caused low scores here.
• Design/Interface: Most of these sites were designed by programmers. (Kind of like our old covers <rimshot>.) And I'm not a design expert. But there was a design sameness to many of the apps that screamed "I used a template and didn't change anything but the colors and icons." Apps that looked like a designer would have been involved rated higher. Another way to lose points here was being too clever with the interface. Apps that tried to create new way of organizing things people expected to see done in an accepted way, like login, lost points here.

Of the more than 200 teams who started, 137 teams submitted completed apps. I didn't judge them all, I judged around 40 I think. Each of the 19 judges got different overlapping lists to judge. As one contestant pointed out, "that's not fair dude" thinking that every judge needed to rate every app for fairness. It looked like each app was judged by around 5 people, I think that was more than enough to offset 1 potential low mark from any 1 judge. This also means there are many finalists I didn't judge, so I'm looking forward to spending a few minutes with them to see what they each do.

Congrats to everyone who participated, even the 100 or so teams who started but didn't complete, hopefully they at least learned something. And all of the teams who created an app in a 48 hour weekend are to be congratulated.

Update on the Wrox Covers

No news.
OK, not really no news. We've worked a ton the last few weeks evaluating and responding to all the feedback we got and we're grateful for it. We'd hoped to have some final new versions ready to show you by now, we've spent more time on it than we thought. We've previewed some very close to final covers to a handful of authors (with books shipping this week) and some authors at last night's SPIN (SharePoint Indy). Out of that we have just a couple of more minor fixes and we really hope we can show you the great results next week.
I can tell you no one will be missing the bus. And they won't be pink.

Updated Sept 4: here's a new post with the final covers

New Wrox Covers

UPDATED Sept 4: Please see this new post with the final new covers

We’ve really enjoyed the author cover photo discussions over the last few years. Despite programmers telling us it’s what’s in the books that matters most, covers are fun to talk about. But most of the discussions we’ve had about covers have involved the tiny fraction of people who are most passionate about our books - user group leaders, authors, their coworkers, and other “influencers”. We’ve thought with this influencer audience the faces of authors have been a good branding point. Especially iconic authors like Dave Sussman, Alex Homer, Bill Evjen, Scott Guthrie, Scott Hanselman, Ivor Horton, Michael Kay – authors whose faces to this crowd are just as recognizable as (no offense guys) a particular camel or rhinoceros.

But to the bigger audience who don’t travel to tech conferences, don’t follow author blogs or twitters, our author photo covers have become a liability. No good programmer makes their book decision solely on a cover, but if there are 2 good books, why not pick the one with a cover that doesn’t scare you?

In the 6.5 years I’ve been involved with Wrox, I’ve been slow to change things I think are important to Wrox customers. I hope with that in mind, you’ll recognize the amount of work and time we’ve put into the new Wrox cover design here we’re announcing today. I’m including 2 mock books so you can see the general look and feel:

  

Edited: The image on the right is much pinker than the real covers. They will still be "Wrox Red" and consistent, not pink!

You’ll note, I didn’t design these. I’m really happy with the great work that marketing and the designer did with these. Our programmer authors are great authors, now we’re enhancing the great content they write with beautiful new covers. You’ll start to see these new covers on books publishing at the end of September. (Please note it will take a few weeks from now to filter the new designs on affected covers out to wrox.com, wiley.com and other online retailers.)

We’ve also switched to a new whiter, smoother paper. The 2nd printing of Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 was the first book to get that, all reprints now get that and all new books as of the end of July are printed on it too. At the same time as the cover design change, we’re changing to a stiffer, more durable cover stock that will stay flatter and won’t curl like the old covers did.

And as always, we’re continuously looking at ways to improve what’s really important to you – what’s between the covers.

If you’re a Wrox author and you’ve got questions about the changes, I hope you’ll contact your acquisitions editor or me. If you’d still like your photos used with the book, authors will have the option of including their photo with their bio in the interior of the book in the “about the author” section. If you’re a fan, customer, or other programmer who found this, we hope you like the changes too.