My Windows machine has over 600mb in printer drivers. I don't want that kind of useless crap on my iOS devices. They can't very well stick them all on your iP* and be expected to constantly manage updates for them as new printer drivers are released.
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Apple Announces 'AirPrint' Wireless Printing for iOS Devices Coming in November
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My Windows machine has over 600mb in printer drivers. I don't want that kind of useless crap on my iOS devices. They can't very well stick them all on your iP* and be expected to constantly manage updates for them as new printer drivers are released.
What good is the new feature if it doesn't work with many people's existing setups and/or requires new hardware (printers, Airport Express, etc.) for it to even work? Sure, AirPrint sounds terrific. But in reality, there's a lot of catches involved for it to work.
Couldn't Apple allow you to download a package of drivers to iTunes, and then let the user select the drivers they want to load onto their iOS devices?
I think people are getting more and more lazy, and the overall technical aptitude is gradually declining. Apple is trying to pander to the lowest common denominator. Managing printer drivers via iTunes is above an average user's technical aptitude. In the grand scheme of things, computing devices are supposed to be tools in people's hands to achieve other tasks and not be the end goal in and of themselves. So, when all is said and done, Steve Jobs is probably on the right track here, and no one besides him can change the way people and computers print. So, kicking and screaming, technically inclined users will have to adapt to the lowest common denominator.
The problem is rumors and hype. Lack of printing was always a con of iOS. Obviously, it was never a big enough problem to deter iOS popularity and adoption. But it's been on some people's wishlists for years.
Then we hear that a new iOS version will have printing, and we all get excited. We make assumptions (yes, I know what happens when you assume) about how it's going to solve the problem we've always wanted solved. We look forward to it eagerly, even though we really don't know the details yet.
And finally we learn the truth about what will be coming, and we discover it does not in fact solve the problem we had. It does not deliver what we hoped. In fact, it delivers nothing new at all. But because we deluded ourselves into thinking our wishes were coming true, we feel like something is being taken away from us. And that makes us mad. In reality, we never had it in the first place. We only had a rumor. But we're still mad. Or at least disappointed.
Printing from my iPad is still on my wishlist of features I wish Apple would implement. But just like Blu-Ray playback in Snow Leopard, I now must accept this is yet another basic computer expectation that Apple will never meet.
Seriously? One little checkbox that says "Enable printing from my iPad." is too difficult? Just how stupid do you think Mac users are? iTunes as a whole is a long way from representing an easy-to-use application. I hardly think a print option contributes to its complexity.
That's why it should just be a checkbox to ask if you want to use the space for printing. I would gladly give 600MB of my iOS disk to enable printing. I'll trade one less movie in my sync list to be able to print. That's a lot cheaper and less wasteful than having to buy a new printer from a special list of Apple-supported printers.
And as long as I have it shared from a Mac. So I take it I can't print directly to a networked printer? All I have is a networked printer, two MacBooks and my iPhone/iPad. This would seem to suggest I'd have to open up my MacBook in order to print from the iPad. Let's hope not... Boo.
Look, here's the deal:
The iPad will never work with "any" printer. That would require EVERY printer manufacturer to provide special iOS drivers for EVERY printer. Doesn't matter if it is USB, WiFi or an AirPort. Won't happen. Move on.
So this is why we have this solution: The printer has to be connected to a computer (which HAS drivers). The iPad only has to create a PDF and send it to the computer. The computer will do the rest.
Alternatively, we need a new kind of printer that doesn't need drivers and eats PDFs, e.g. eprint.
All complaining is pointless. There is pretty much no other option to do this right.
The iPad will never work with "any" printer. That would require EVERY printer manufacturer to provide special iOS drivers for EVERY printer. Doesn't matter if it is USB, WiFi or an AirPort. Won't happen. Move on.
So this is why we have this solution: The printer has to be connected to a computer (which HAS drivers). The iPad only has to create a PDF and send it to the computer. The computer will do the rest.
Alternatively, we need a new kind of printer that doesn't need drivers and eats PDFs, e.g. eprint.
All complaining is pointless. There is pretty much no other option to do this right.
Not so. At the very least, they could easily provide a generic PostScript driver and a generic PCL driver. I'll bet that would cover 99.9% of business printers, and probably a good 75%+ of home laser printers too.
it's 8C5091e.
Currently AirPrint requires a Mac running SL 10.6.5b as the host, and you can print to any of its attached printers. Hopefully we will see an update to bonjour (mac/pc) to support AirPrint, and also printers that directly support AirPrint.
You won't be able to print directly to network printers unless they support AirPrint. Hopefully some of the existing printers will see firmware updates?
Well perhaps your right but it is also in part due to Apple's advertising. They didn't say "with iOs 4.2 and some new printers, wifi printing will be possible". They rather said "wireless printing is new in iOS 4.2". That is grossly misleading and its natural for the people to make the assumptions they did.
Well hopefully now that the basic printing functionality will be pervasive throughout the OS some third party developers can simply add in drivers into the printing framework and allows us to do just that.
Don't be ridiculous, you can have the iOS device contact some Apple server and immediately download the specific driver you need for your print job, and only that driver. The storage space on Apple's side is minimal, and if your iOS device is only using a couple of drivers at most, the space on it is also negligible and perhaps something the users would be willing to sacrifice. The issue here, as with so much else that Apple does, is they want to press upon the internet community a new single printing standard. So just like there was 500 ports before we went to USB, and just like there were hundreds of audio codecs, those have been standardized. We're seeing the same issue with Video now. The issue isn't that it's not possible now, but that Apple likely sees implementing such a feature now as likely holding back progress.
There are many WiFi printers on the market today and that also support Bonjour. You can print to these using a generic Internet Printing Protocol (IPP).
So my real question is, how is AirPrint different than WiFi printers that support IPP and Bonjour?!? Maybe AirPrint is simply IPP and Bonjour mixed with a little "apple magic" to make it different and incompatible.
+1
This is the Apple way lately though. See Facetime for video calls also. Why use an existing protocol when you can invent another.
For those of you with networked HP printers...
http://www.hp.com/global/us/en/consumer/digital_photography/free/software/iprint-photo.html
I use the Symbian app on my old Nokia E71 via HP JetDirect and their Mobile Print driver.
I see your incredible failure has been pointed out by many others, but the sheer pomposity of your post forces me to add my feedback too. "Cottoned on to" is a perfectly valid expression, in the UK as well as in the US. Your folk-linguistic assumption that the poster meant to type "caughtened on to" is laughable, and you have made yourself look very silly. Perhaps you should stick to commenting on the matter in hand rather than set yourself up for ridicule by making pompous, and erroneous, statements about linguistic usage.I don't usually go around correcting people's grammar and spelling but this is pretty hilarious and I thought I'd spare you future embarrassment by tipping you off on this...
"cottoned on to this"
The expression I believe you're trying to use is "caught on to this", as in "catch".
Bro, whoever you're hanging around and introduced that expression to you, I'm assuming they're saying "caughtened on to this" (which is still incorrect and also poor grammar) and you were led to believe it had something to do with the fluffy stuff. You need to hang around brighter people.
/end rant.
Have you really thought this through? No other options? Are you an engineer of any kind that might be applicable to this problem space?
How do you explain that pretty much every computer can print to pretty much any printer even if it doesn't recognize it? Basic, common, print drivers, perhaps? Sure, you can't take advantage of every whiz-bang feature a particular printer offers without its own special drivers, but printing a plain text document is not complicated.
And how do you explain the magic behind sticking a flash card into a printer and photos coming out? Everyone's flash card has every printers' drivers on them? No. Printers already know how to print common things. They know it innately.
It really shouldn't be that hard for an iOS device to send basic print requests to any printer. It might not support quality levels, front+back prints, collation options or all that jazz.. but that's probably not what most people want to print. Home users that I know print: plain text emails, coupon images, resumes, school papers, and maps.
This is exactly how Apple should have solved this. The storage space on Apple's side is irrelevant because they've already allocated that space to hold those drivers for Mac OS. And most printer drivers I've ever seen fit easily enough on a floppy disk. That's a tiny amount of space relative to any iOS device's capacity. And downloading would rarely be a problem; the iOS device either has 3G built-in, or chances are, the wifi network it's using to access the printer it's trying to print to also provides internet.
That's why it was always so absurd that iOS never supported printing in the first place. They have the infrastructure to solve the problem seemlessly and easily. The solution isn't challenging. The only explanation is that there must be some underhanded licensing fee to be an Apple-ready printer or something else entirely unrelated to actually printing. Or Apple is pushing their own printing standard agenda or something.
To the contrary, I'm surprised printer compatability is such a big issue these days. There really isn't much complexity to "put this color dot here on this page". When memory and bandwidth suffered severe limitations, it made sense to have a library of complexities to squeeze as much performance out of limited systems to do what users wanted. Today, printing should be little more than shipping a bitmap to an IP address. Maybe Jobs realized this and had his minions work out the lowest common denominator across the printer market and deliver no-hassle printing thereto.
(Yes I'm aware of the overhead issues. I've written lowest-level printer drivers, and was first to add USB2 to a major manufacturer's printers. Upshot is nowadays network printing should be trivial and transparent to users, and can be wit some creativity and squinting.)
Any computer can print to any printer without recognizing it? Not for anything more complicated than plain text.
For real printing, though higher end laser printers generally support PostScript or PCL language standards, inkjet printers generally do not, and require a driver be installed in order to print. Worse, many of these inkjets and lots of cheaper laser printers are host-based printers, which are essentially dumb machines that require the print job to be rasterized on the host PC. There are tons of different print engines (and variations within engines) used on such printers, and Apple certainly has no reason to try to create printer drivers for every consumer inkjet released in the last 10 years. As for printer manufacturers, while they might create the necessary drivers for some of their printers currently on the market, you can bet they'll ignore all older devices (most ignore older machines even on new desktop OS releases), as well as the lower end models in their current line-up.
Also, given iOS devices' limited resources, rasterizing a print job on the device (which is required for these host-based printers) would be slow and a massive memory drain -- and would have required a HUGE amount of work on Apple's part to even allow for such background printing applications to be used.
As for printers being able to print a file directly, that is handled completely differently than printing from a PC (or potentially iOS device).
Your solution to making print drivers available is simple enough, but, again, there's no such thing as a small number of generic print drivers that would work across nearly all printers in the marketplace. Also, printer drivers fitting on a floppy disk is definitely not the case with print drivers for host-based printers when used on non-Windows operating systems. Since those printers are really designed to interface with Windows GDI system, using them on alternative OS's requires MUCH larger print drivers. HP's basic Linux print driver for their current Inkjet printers (no scanning, no add-on crapware, etc) runs over 20MB. The print drivers for HP and Epson printers that ship with Snow Leopard come in at 366MB and 288MB respectively, and there still isn't support for all models. That would be fun to deal with on your phone/tablet. They certainly could allow PostScript and PCL printing only, but then you (and everyone else here) would be upset instead that they had to buy a new laser printer in order to print from their iOS device.
Every printer for decades now has implemented at least one of a small handful of basic-functionality standards. While each printer demanded its own special drivers to improve performance under limited capabilities, they all respond in a predictable way to some old and standard commands. If nothing else, just print a bitmap covering the whole page, letting the client program lay out characters etc. Nearly all printers nowadays are USB based, a protocol which defines a minimal and reasonable interface. So long as you're not trying to use some weird printer-specific feature going beyond normal printing, you can print on any printer with minimal knowledge about it.
(Just don't get stupid about what constitutes "any". Safe to assume we're not including ancient stuff like Cenronics-port Epson RX-80s - which the above still likely applies to so long as you can get it on the network somehow.)
You may want to dig a little deeper. Canon released a software update (both Win & Mac) that really fixed this up. Works great with my network.
Should add: using Tiger, Snow Leopard, Win7. Wired network to the printer from routers, although the laptops are wireless to the router.
Yes, it's impossible for the iPhone 3G to support this feature. Ok, that's a total LIE. It's more like "Isn't it time you've upgraded your iPhone already??? Hmmmm????"
The idea that you'll need a "special" printer is just lovely as well. Throw out your existing printer just so you can print from your iPad. They couldn't have an option to connect to your Mac or PC and then have it forward it to a printer using a normal driver. No, just toss out your current printer and go buy a new one. I wonder how much HP paid them to do that? Just think of all the new printer sales....Oh wait. They make all their money selling ink for $20k a gallon, so it doesn't matter much.
The idea that you'll need a "special" printer is just lovely as well. Throw out your existing printer just so you can print from your iPad. They couldn't have an option to connect to your Mac or PC and then have it forward it to a printer using a normal driver. No, just toss out your current printer and go buy a new one. I wonder how much HP paid them to do that? Just think of all the new printer sales....Oh wait. They make all their money selling ink for $20k a gallon, so it doesn't matter much.
misses the point
I find this rather upsetting. To my mind, the whole method of adding printing abilities to iOS centers around the fact that the devices are mobile, i.e., in many different places at different times. This means dealing with printers owned by many different people. Wouldn't it therefore be sensible to make the iOS device compatible with as many existing printers as possible, so that the feature would be immediately useful? If I want to print something on my hotel's printer in Zagreb, I can't really count on the idea that they'll have a new printer which happens to be AirPrint-compatible.
To my mind, this implementation makes the feature nearly useless, at least for the foreseeable future. Sad. I was really looking forward to being able to print from my iPod.
I find this rather upsetting. To my mind, the whole method of adding printing abilities to iOS centers around the fact that the devices are mobile, i.e., in many different places at different times. This means dealing with printers owned by many different people. Wouldn't it therefore be sensible to make the iOS device compatible with as many existing printers as possible, so that the feature would be immediately useful? If I want to print something on my hotel's printer in Zagreb, I can't really count on the idea that they'll have a new printer which happens to be AirPrint-compatible.
To my mind, this implementation makes the feature nearly useless, at least for the foreseeable future. Sad. I was really looking forward to being able to print from my iPod.
C'mon. I'd download these in a heartbeat if they worked, even on a 16GB iDevice. It's like one more app. No problem here, load it up. What decade are you in?
You ought to be able to at least sync your own computer's printer drivers to the device (for the Mac at least) so that you can print at home with your own printers. The drivers already exist. How much trouble would it be for iTunes to install your printer driver for you that you already have set up in OSX? Otherwise, forget about printing? Yee-ha. Great job Mr. Jobs.