Advertisement

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.