Printopia
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Friday Favorite: Yet another reason to love Printopia
I'm a huge fan of Ecamm's Printopia utility. For just 20 bucks, it enables you to print from iOS to any printer connected to your Mac. You don't need to buy a high-priced AirPlay-enabled system. I'm running Printopia with an old piece-of-junk Brother laser printer that is older than some of my kids. Until this week, I didn't really use Printopia's "Send to Dropbox" or "Send to Mac" features. I normally just connect my iPhone and iPad to my Mac using Image Capture to transfer pictures, which has been a terrific way to manage the images I need for TUAW write-ups. Yesterday, however, after installing Mavericks, that workflow broke. For whatever reason, Image Capture just would not connect properly to my iPhone. And that's when I thought of using Printopia rather than emailing individual pictures. The great thing about "printing" pictures is how well integrated the process is with the Photos app. It requires just a few taps to print. With Printopia's "Send to" options, I was able to transfer my pictures with a minimum of fuss and bother. Plus, bonus, I didn't need to connect any cables. It worked brilliantly. The convenience didn't stop there though. It occurred to me that I could "print" Safari articles that I wanted a copy of, directly from my iPhone without having to return to my desk. Sure enough, the Printopia Send to Mac option created a perfect PDF of the active webpage, saved it to my Documents folder and opened it in Preview. Although I haven't used these options much in the past, I can see myself starting to use them a lot more from here on. And, of course, Printopia still makes it simple and convenient to print from my phone.
Ecamm releases Printopia Pro for corporate users
Ecamm already makes the popular Printopia app; it's a Mac-based solution for printing from iOS devices (and other connected Macs) for those that don't wish to use or purchase specific AirPrint-supported printers. Now the company has released Printopia Pro to tackle the bigger challenges of AirPrint in corporate or institutional networks. Similar to Printopia, Printopia Pro leverages AirPrint, but without the need for investment in new, AirPrint-supported printers. Ecamm has taken the features of Printopia and powered them up in Printopia Pro to work in extremely demanding print circumstances. [Some enterprise users have aimed to solve this problem with Lantronix's xPrintServer hardware, which now comes in both office and home editions. –Ed.] Printopia Pro is scalable to support hundreds of users and supports all the existing printers on your network. With centralized management, you can manage print jobs, access controls, configure printers and monitor printer status in real-time and from any location. The product supports printing across subnets (a key drawback of the basic AirPrint service, which normally requires some DNS and wide-area Bonjour tweaking to overcome) and integrates with corporate directory services for access control to printers. Print jobs can be sent via Secure AirPrint, using SSL encryption to hide them from network snoopers. You can even configure Printopia Pro to provide PDF virtual printers, so iOS users can transparently print to web or server folders for paperless workflows. Pricing starts at US$79 for teams/small businesses and goes up to $499 for enterprise customers. Further details and a trial upon request can be found at the Printopia Pro website, here.
Canon adds AirPrint to Pixma printers
Canon today announced 3 of its all-in-one Pixma printers will now support AirPrint from Apple. The printers are the MG8220, the MG6220 and the MG5320. Canon has posted a web page with more details. Some of the printers may require a firmware update to function properly. AirPrint is the wireless printing technology Apple introduced in iOS 4.2, offering print services from the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. Originally, AirPrint was heralded to work with a variety of printers networked to a Mac, but when actually released AirPrint worked with only a handful of HP products. Third parties have offered AirPrint functionality to get around the Apple restrictions. Printopia works quite well, and works with almost any networked printer. Another Bonjour-based printing solution is available from FingerPrint,
TUAW TV Live: The post-iOS 4.2 show
A few weeks ago, in anticipation of iOS 4.2 making its way to our iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads, I hosted an hour-long episode of TUAW TV Live in which we journeyed together through some of the upcoming features of the OS upgrade. On today's show, we'll see how well some of the new features work in reality. I'll show you how AirPrint works from iPad and iPhone using Ecamm's Printopia software on the Mac, play with AirPlay, and discuss the pros and cons of iOS 4.2. With RapidWeaver 5.0 now available and a giveaway of ten licenses for the popular web design tool going on right now here on TUAW, I'll also be demonstrating the new version of the application and highlighting some of the features of RapidWeaver 5.0. With Apple seemingly ignoring iWeb during the release of iLife '11, RapidWeaver is looking like a contender for the title of best easy-to-use web design tool. Join us at 5 PM ET today here at TUAW. Just drop by a few minutes before the start of the show for instructions on how to view the livestream and participate in the chat. Remember that all TUAW TV Live shows are archived for your viewing pleasure on Ustream.
AirPrint Hacktivator enables AirPrint for any printer
You've updated your iPad and iPhone to iOS 4.2, and you want to print something, ... anything, but that printer hooked up to your Mac doesn't show up in the list of available devices. What can you do to make your iOS user experience complete? As Mike noted in his AirPrint roundup last week, Netputing took note of the re-enabling process that Chris posted about and created a little hack called AirPrint Hacktivator (which now uses a different method than it did originally, see below). You can easily install it on your Mac and be printing like a maniac from your iOS 4.2 device in minutes. It's a simple, non-Terminal way to fool your iPad or iPhone into thinking that your shared printer just happens to be one of those HP ePrint printers that work seamlessly with AirPrint.
Hands on: iPad printing with 4.2 and AirPrint, a limited menu
If AirPlay's first-generation limitations have disappointed a lot of would-be iPhone video mavens who had dreamed of quickly sharing their clips to the big screen, you can just imagine how irate everyone is about AirPrint. The universal shared printer solution for iPhone and iPad was kneecapped in late builds of Mac OS X 10.6.5 for reasons yet to be revealed, and the result is that a big-ticket feature has shipped with very little real-world applicability -- at least, out of the box. Fortunately, if you're willing to do a little bit of finagling or lay out a small amount of cash, you can quickly gain back the AirPrint functionality you were promised, and more. Let's take a quick look at what's in the 'vanilla' version of AirPrint, then move on to the expanded remix edition.
AirPrint on steroids: first look at Printopia, bringing shared printer support for iPad
When Apple removed AirPrint shared printer support from Mac OS X 10.6.5, it created a functionality gap that developers moved quickly to fill. Yesterday, TUAW took a first look at FingerPrint, an AirPrint solution that enables iDevice printing to many Mac OS X shared printers. Today, we have an exclusive first peek at Printopia, a competing product from long-established Mac developer Ecamm. Like FingerPrint, the $9.95 Printopia allows non-supported printers to work directly with Apple's new wireless AirPrint functionality; both products also allow PowerPC users on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard to share printers for iPad use (a great way to get some utility out of that G4 Mac mini in the closet). But that's just where Printopia gets started. This easy-to-use system control panel expands AirPrint features to provide support for Dropbox file sharing and printing to Mac-based PDF files.
