iPhone News Updated

Three IPhone and IPad Printing Apps

It may not be easy to print from your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, but it can be done–provided you seek out the help of a third-party app. But which one should you turn to for help? Here’s a look at three apps vying to assist you with all your mobile printing needs.

PrinterShare is an awkward app to set up; besides installing it on your Mac, you also have to register an account. After that, on your Mac, you have to specify which printer (or printers) you want to share, whether you want to hide your printer from search results (more on this in a moment), find the remote printer as registered online, select the printer (which is now displayed in two panes of the main Mac application window, and then configure the printer (paper size, “notify me on job completion,” encrypt or not, and so on). In addition, a third window appears when you click on the Mac application’s “incoming” button, and that provides you with a variety of options, including setting default permissions (automatically download and print from approved users, wait for approval, remove, and so forth).

This all makes sense, in a way, because PrinterShare is designed to enable you to print remotely, over the Web, and to allow multiple users to print to the same machine remotely. (For example, employees can all remotely print to a shared printer.) However, there’s no apparent option for simply printing over a local network. And although you can choose to hide your printer from search results (when you are searching for a printer from the iPhone app), it seems that the only way for users to find their own printer is to make it public and find it; then, once that’s done, they can hide it from search results. It’s a confusing process, in part because developer Dynamix Software attempts to protect users from having their printers hijacked by unknown users. It seems, however, that the first option should simply enable you to link your iPhone to your printer by using your user ID, and that “searching” for printers should be a secondary option (because it would probably be unnecessary for most users).

PrinterShare lets you print photos, contacts, Web pages, and the contents of your iPhone’s clipboard. The results are not bad, but far from perfect: you have no control over the font size on Web pages, so the results may turn out to be difficult, if not impossible, to read because the resulting printout uses too small a font size. You must type in the URL you want to print every time; you can’t save or bookmark pages you want to print frequently. In addition, the app is prone to crashing and freezing; when I tried to print my contacts, the app froze every time, and took several attempts to restart properly.

PrinterShare version 1.3.1 is compatible with the iPad; the iPad version takes advantage of the entire screen in standard iPad resolution, and works in exactly the same fashion on the iPad as it does on the iPhone.

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Just tell your iPhone what you want

What’s Apple up to now? Yesterday it became public that the company had acquired Siri, whose sole purpose in life appears to be to make Siri, a free iPhone app that helps you find things and make plans.

To watch Siri in action, it does look pretty useful. But why did Apple pay as much as $200 million for something that it could get for free at the iTunes store?

Answer?

One theory suggests that the technology might help Apple better compete with Google.

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