AirPrint

There’s still something kinda magical-feeling about printing documents from your iPhone. Maybe someone sends you a long Word or Pages document that you prefer to read on paper. Or maybe you must sign a hard-copy version of a PDF and send it back via real paper mail.

You may be used to facing a task like this in your iPhone’s email app, and putting it off until you get to your Mac or PC. But chances are, if you own a fairly modern printer, you can just print right from the iPhone. In fact, once you get a taste for it, you’ll prefer printing from iOS. You will never need to deal with drivers, or pick up your 100-page print job only to find every sheet printed too small.

The answer is AirPrint. It’s how printers always should have worked.

The new Yahoo! Mail app for iOS has received another update just two weeks after its big revamp. This release adds support for Apple’s AirPrint service, allowing you to wirelessly print emails and attachments from your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

Every now and then – less often these days – you hear about an app that’s really new, genuinely new. It does something you’ve not seen done before. It’s a whole new idea. Foldify is one those apps: it’s fun for kids and grown-ups alike, it’s reasonably-priced, and above all it smacks of genius.

An online petition has been created to try to convince Apple to make changes to its Bonjour network discovery service and related technologies including AirPlay and AirPrint. The petition is asking Apple to redesign Bonjour and other services to deliver a better fit with education and enterprise networks. It was started by Lee Badman, wireless network architect for Syracuse University, on behalf of the Higher Ed Wireless Networking Admin Group at Educause, a non-profit resource organization for IT staff working in higher education.

Lantronix, a company which sounds like a Transformer, has added a home version of the xPrintServer to its lineup. Like its office-bound older brother, this xPrintServer lets you print to any printer in your home via AirPrint.

When worlds collide – this is ostensibly an iOS tip, but it involves a Mac App, which should technically be an OS X tip, but hey – you probably know how to print from your Mac. It’s more likely that, like me, you have a printer that you use with your Mac and it isn’t one of them newfangled fancy AirPrint ones, neither. While AirPrint protocol has been around since iOS 4, I still haven’t bought a printer with it built in. Hey, mine works just fine, still!

If so, you can print from your iPhone or iPad to the printer connected to your Mac, using Printopia 2, a $20 Mac utility available from developer eCamm.

You’ve got an iPad. You were so taken with this magical device that you decided to write the next great American novel that doesn’t involve sparkling vampires using Pages or another word processing app for the iPad. One problem: How to print it.

The Brother MFC-J825DW is one of the latest Brother printers to join HP, Lexmark, Epson and Canon as a capable Airprint printer. So how does it work with the iPad?

Apple introduced the iOS printing a year and a half ago in the form of the iOS feature AirPrint. Although the feature has been available for some time, only a handful of printers ship with AirPrint support. There are, of course, a couple of ways around that limited selection like the Lantronix xPrintServer, the OS X Printopia utility, and FingerPrint for both OS X and Windows.

Those are great options for home use, but what about business users? The iPad is the best selling business tablet by a huge margin and that should translate into at least some workplace printing – or should it?

The AirPrint feature in iOS let’s you print from your iPhone or iPad to your home printer – directly if you have one of the handful of AirPrint-capable printers on the market or using a print server device or utility on your Mac like Printopia or FingerPrint.

AirPrint addresses the basic need to print, but it isn’t really a mobile solution. What if you’re on a business trip or vacation and need to print? What if you’re headed to a meeting and forgot to print out brochures ahead of time?

You have an office full of cubicle jockeys, and you have a network full of printers. And a lot of your workers come to the office with iPads and iPhones. Now, I hate printers, but even I realize that people need to put things on paper from time to time. And even a printer lover doesn’t want to re-equip the whole office with AirPrint-ready machines.

Thankfully, you don’t have to. The Lantronix xPrintServer will convert the whole network for you.

The ability to print documents from an iOS device is a feature that many of us find incredibly useful, but Apple’s implementation has its flaws — such as the need for an AirPrint compatible printer. But thank to xPrintServer from Lantronix, you can wirelessly print to almost any networked printer from any iOS device.

Till now, HP has held a huge advantage over it’s printer rivals when it comes to printing from the iPad — because even though rivals have made strides with their own apps (like Epson’s slick iPrint app) HP’s printers remain the only ones with AirPrint, which is tied directly to iOS and allows printing from within apps, without having to use an intermediary app (eg iPrint).

Having the Maps app on the iPhone is a lifesaver for me. Not only does it help me navigate my way around places I don’t know, but it’ll also tell me how to get there when I leave the house.

However, trying to read directions from an iPhone while driving isn’t ideal, and it’s certainly not safe. Fortunately, iOS 5 allows you to print your directions from directly within the Maps app as long as you have a printer compatible with AirPrint. Here’s how!

There will soon be a day when a driver is not required for printing. Wireless printing has become more of a household standard as new printers roll out with cloud technology, and Apple is looking to make the printing experience as painless and seamless as possible.

Two interesting patents applications were recently filed by Apple that detail printing protocols and APIs that don’t require drivers, with more of a focus also being placed on printing from the cloud.

So you’re a cutting edge, Post-PC consumer. You’ve bought into the Cloud, have all the latest apps on your iPad, and you work on the go. Just tweet this, email that, and print out an electronic boarding pass before you head to the airport.

Not so fast on that last step. There’s a tantalizing Print button in many iOS apps these days, but very few printers are usable without some extra work first. Unlike printing on the Mac or PC, AirPrint (the iOS-based printing system) is still not yet a fully realized solution. Fortunately, workarounds are available.

Definitely a major bag of goodies announced by Apple at WWDC today, but one item many expected further info on was not discussed: the ability to finally print from an iPad or iPhone using AirPrint and your existing printer shared by your Mac. A bit surprising that this important feature is still missing in action.

2010 was a huge year for Apple news. As we close out the year, we look back at some of the year’s biggest stories and what they might mean for 2011.

iOS 4.2.1 was just released, but already the rumor mill is churning about iOS 4.3… and it looks like it might arrive before the end of the year, much earlier than anyone had previously thought.

According to sources, Apple plans on releasing iOS 4.3 on Monday, December 13th… just three weeks after the debut of iOS 4.2.1.

One of the most frustrating aspects of iOS 4.2 and OS X 10.6.5 is how Apple’s new wireless printing standard, AirPrint, was gimped at the last minute from running on pretty much every shared network printer connected to a Mac to only officially supported on 11 AirPrint-compatible printers.

One iPad owner named Stan was so frustrated, in fact, that he wrote to Steve Jobs. “You got me all hyped about AirPrint. Now with iOS 4.2 released, I find out that I can only print on 11 select printers. Seriously?!”

Seriously, replies Steve, before reassuring Stan that the move to driverless, wireless printing is a vast undertaking, and that iOS 4.2’s AirPrint support is only the first step.

Last week’s great disappointment was the discovery that Apple had mostly pulled AirPrint support from OS X 10.6.5, which would allow you to print documents directly from iOS to almost any shared network printer. Native AirPrint support was trimmed only to a small number of AirPrint-compatible HP printers, and while hacks exist to get AirPrint support back via the command line, they’re a little beyond the capability of most users.

Enter FingerPrint, a new application from Collobos Software that enables AirPrint printing over Bonjour for many of the omitted printers. It accomplishes its neat trick by fooling Bonjour into broadcasting your normal printer in such a way that iOS 4.2 can see it.

Right now, if you have Mac OS X 10.6.5 and an iPad running iOS 4.2 GM, AirPrint’s a bit of a mess: some people are reporting that it is working, but many are not having any luck.

We suspected that it was just this sort of compatibility problems that caused Apple to scale AirPrint support back to AirPrint-compatible printers at the last minute, but developer Steven Troughton-Smith has some instructions on how to bring it to your Mac under OS X 10.6.5 and iOS 4.2 GM.

Yesterday, reports suggested that support for Apple’s AirPrint feature had been plucked from iOS 4.2 for shared printers connected to Macs and PCs, leaving only a subset of AirPrint-compatible HP printers mentioned in the official developer documentation.

Has Apple just had last minute compatibility problems they’re not willing to delay their iOS 4.2 update for, or has the AirPrint feature been canceled? Not according to Steve Jobs, but unfortunately, his comments on the matter aren’t particularly illuminating.

Along with AirPlay, AirPrint was a fiercely promoted new feature in iOS 4.2, promising a powerful new printing architecture that allows iOS devices to easily and wirelessly print to any networked printer.

Don’t be surprised, though, if AirPrint is nowhere to be seen when iOS 4.2 is released on Friday: according to a report on MacStories, Apple has pulled support for AirPrint from iOS 4.2 at the last minute.

Starting in November when iOS 4.2 drops, we’ll finally be able to print directly from the iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad through AirPrint. At the beginning, AirPrint will mostly only work with printers shared on your network, but eventually, AirPrint-certified printers will appear that can sense nearby iOS devices out-of-the-book.

In the meantime, though, we’re going to have to settle for some printers kludging iOS printing… namely by assigning each printer an e-mail address to which documents can be sent for printing through your iPhone or iPad’s built-in Mail.app.

HP’s just announced three such printers: the HP Envy e-All-In-One, which will cost $249 and do the whole smorgasbord of home printing duties including printing, copying and scanning; the HP OfficeJet Pro 8500A Plus, an all-in-one office inkjet with wireless connectivity; and the HP PhotoSmart eStation, which costs $499 and is capable of printing photos of up to 9600×2400 dpi, and comes with an optional (blargh) Android tablet.

They’re all attractive printers, and they are all technically “AirPrint-compatible” in that when AirPrint rolls down the software update pipeline, they’ll at least be shareable from your Mac. If you want a truly AirPrint compatible printer, though, best wait for a spell longer.