For Windows users, one such AirPrint-enabling software is FingerPrint. The printer can be attached to the Mac via USB, or plugged to a router the important point is that the Mac must be able to ‘see’ the printer and print to it, in order for you to be able to share it with your iOS devices. But like other similar apps, you’ve to install it on a host Mac. Third party apps have also stepped in to bring iOS wireless printing to printers that don’t support AirPrint. Another alternative is to hope that your printer’s manufacturer would release its own app in the App Store so that you can use it as a gateway to print your documents. Still, this is a small number compared to the hundreds of printer models currently out in the market. But last we checked, there are now more than 130 printers - from the likes of Brother, Canon, Epson, HP, and Lexmark - that support it. In the beginning, only a handful of HP printers supported AirPrint. In Apple’s own words, all you need to do is to “tap print, select the printer that supports AirPrint, and print.” The proposition is certainly very attractive: You don’t need to install any driver or configure a printer. A highly anticipated feature that debuted in iOS 4.2, it allows AirPrint-enabled apps on your iOS device to wirelessly print to an AirPrint-supported printer residing on the same Wi-Fi network. And now, you can too.If you’ve an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, you might have heard of something called AirPrint. And Printopia’s smart if I print an image, it’s treated as an image file. That means if I snap a photo, take a screenshot, or write something in Pages, I can choose to Print to Dropbox, and the file quickly shoots into the appropriate place on my Mac. So all those options appear as potential pseudo-printers on my iOS devices. In Printopia’s preference pane, I added options like Send to Dropbox, Send to Desktop, Send to Acorn-my image editor of choice-and Send to Cloud, a free service for quickly generating public links to images or snippets of text. Printopia recreates that concept, of printing to different file formats on your Mac, from your iOS device. That’s when you use the Print dialog on your box not to print a hard copy, but to “print”-and note that I’m saying the word “print” with quotation marks around it-to a PDF document that you can then email off to someone, or save, or whatever you need. You may be familiar with the notion of “Printing to PDF” on your Mac. The sole requirement is that the Mac on which you installed Printopia needs to be powered on in order for your iOS devices to see the printers.īut as I alluded to before, making your printers AirPrint-ready is at best half of the joy of using Printopia. Tap the Print button, and those printers you checked in Printopia will appear as available options for printing. Go back to your iPhone or iPad and find a document you’d like to print. Make sure the printers you want your iOS device to be able to see are checked-and your setup is complete. That might include printers connected via USB, or printers plugged into an AirPort base station that your Mac also connects to. The preference pane should find all the printers your Mac can print to. Printopia installs as a Preference Pane inside System Preferences on your Mac. Once you fall in love with Printopia like I did, it costs twenty bucks to own. What’s proved even more important to me in my daily use is that Printopia can print to files on your Mac, too-but we’ll get to that in a bit.ĭownload a free trial of Printopia from Ecamm’s website, which we’ll include in the show notes. If your Mac can print to a printer, Printopia can enable your iOS device to do so, too.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |