Printing

Lately, it’s not that hard to get a direct answer to your query from Steve Jobs himself; he responds to burning questions via e-mail quite often. Unfortunately, his answers rarely contain more than a few words. Macrumors reports that a reader asked Steve Jobs via e-mail why the iPad cannot print documents. Steve’s answer? “It will come.” Even if we disregard the possibility that the e-mail may be fake, Steve’s answer gives us very little to be happy about as we have no idea when printing to the iPad will come. Will it come this summer? When the next version arrives? Sometime in the next decade? We’re optimists, so we’ll just pretend that Steve meant “soon.” ...

Whenever you want to print out a document, you rely on your local operating system, which must have drivers installed for each printer you intend to use. Most of the time, it’s not an issue: at home, you probably have one printer, and all your PCs have the required drivers. Things get a bit more complicated when you want to print something from a mobile device, like an iPad. Or a laptop based on Google’s Chrome OS, which relies entirely on web apps and services. This is why Google is working on Google Cloud Print, a service that enables “any application (web, desktop, or mobile) on any device to print to any printer.” ...