Print Wirelessly From iPad to Any Printer? There’s an App for That
Posted in: Accessories and Peripherals, ios, ipad, Today's Chili
One of the features pulled from the iOS 4.2 update at the last minute was the ability to print to any printer connected to your Mac (more correctly, the functionality was not added in OS X 10.6.5). Printopia, from Ecamm, solves this, without any messy hacks, and it adds more besides.
You can still print from an iPad to a purpose-made AirPrint printer, but who wants to buy a printer these days? Nope, better to repurpose the piece of junk you already have (and lets face it, nobody has ever designed a good printer). Printopia is a preference-pane that lists any printers you have installed on your Mac, and when you choose the print option in any compatible iOS app, (Safari, for instance), the printer shows up right in the menu.
But what if you don’t have, or want, a printer? Printopia has you covered. You can choose to print to a PDF, which is then saved on the Mac (in a new Documents/Printopia folder), and if you have Dropbox installed (which you should, as it is both awesome and free) then there’s even an option to save a PDF into your Dropbox. This last option should show up automatically, but for me it only works on my MacBook, not my iMac. Then again, my entire Documents folder is inside my Dropbox so, like, whatever.
Printopia is available now, for $10, and you can try it free for a week.
Printopia product page [Ecamm]
See Also:
- Print from iPad, Cellphones with 'Google Cloud Print'
- Rumor: Apple's iOS Printing Crippled on Release
- Colleges Dream of Paperless, iPad-centric Education
- iOS 4.2 First Look: iPad Gets Multitasking, Printing
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