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As I wrote in The iPad 2 Projects Book, AirVideo is my favorite iPad app. Combined with iTunes Home Sharing and AirPlay, a Mac with AirVideo and AirPlay-capable devices makes a phenomenal expansive and expandable media environment.

A couple of Christmases past (or should that be Chanukahs?), my brother and co-author, Michael, gave us an AirPort Express that we initially employed on our enclosed patio to play our iTunes music through attached speakers and extend the range of our network for better reception in the backyard for our iPhones. Then, Apple released the iPad and that gave us better range for them as well — yes, we have three of them in the household at present: two originals and an iPad 2. The addition of AirPlay, coincident with the release of the iPad 2 a few months ago raised the utility of the Express quite a bit, because we could now stream the content on our iPads, and AirView leveraged it as well, providing us with external speakers for shows we were watching on our iPads.

Recently, we added a new AppleTV 2 to the mix. Now, I can stream just about any type of video that I can view on my Mac: DivX, xvid, mpeg-2, Flash, you name it, through AirVideo to an iPad and stream that content to the HDTV via the AppleTV, without being constrained by the availability of what I want to view being in a “compatible” format.

While Steve Jobs is (perhaps justifiably) accused of constructing a reality distortion field during his keynote addresses, I’m convinced that the “digital hub” that he foretold about a decade back is alive and well, firmly grounded in Apple’s ecosystem. As Carly Simon sings (music by Marvin Hammlisch and lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager), “Nobody Does It Better.”

The epub version of The iPad Project Book, available from iBooks, is currently in the top 30:

You can also buy it for Kindle or the normal printed version; just look to the right.

Just another quick note: the book is going to the printer within the week. What book? This book.

Just a quick note: on the SFWA blog today, author Cat Rambo muses about the future of electronic publishing and what it may mean to traditional publishing enterprises.

Those science-fiction writers: always thinking about the future of this and that….

We’re writing the book right now. We think you’ll like it.

Meanwhile, if you have an iPad, get the new iOS 3.2.1 update for it. No obvious new features, but it cures some Wi-Fi problems. More information about it is here.

I need to create an avatar, based on a photo of me, to use in Facebook. I don’t want to use a normal image; I want to digitally manipulated it slightly. I can do the manipulation in the free iApp PhotoPad, but I needed to get the image to PhotoPad, which means getting it in the Photos app on my iPad.

Since I’m too lazy to connect my iPad to my Mac, I uploaded the image to my Photobucket account, and using the free Photobucket app, moved it to Saved Photos, which appeared, magically as an Album in my iPad’s Photos.

Welcome to iPad Projects.

Now start writing . . .