iPhone App Review: Printopia 2.0

Posted Apr 18, 2011 at 8:54AM EST by QJ Staff

Listed in: Applications Tags: airprint, apple, ios, software

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AirPrint by itself has a problem which still hasn’t been fixed. It doesn’t have support for shared printers. It works only with some AirPrint enabled HP printers and Apples promise of enabling shared Printers (which was seen on beta versions of OS X and iOS) was absent from the official versions of iOS 4.2 and OS X 10.6.5. However, as you would expect, people have used hacks to re-enable this feature. One of the hacks is Printopia which definitely has to be one of the most elegant hacks. Printopia provides a graphical user interface in the system preferences which allows you to manage shared printers. It also allow for printing a document to a virtual location either on your Mac or in Dropbox. Printopia 2.0 brings with it improvements on its existing features. It adds support for unlimited printers present in any location as well as PDF workflows and applications. Using Printopia 2.0 you can send any document from your iPhone via AirPrint to any app on the Mac which can preview that document. Let me give you an example. Say you find a PDF on your iPhone which you want to read on your Mac (which is on the same network and has Printopia running on it). You can ‘print it’ to Evernote and the document will automatically open in the Evernote app on your Mac. This feature also works well with other apps such as Preview, Yojimbo, Pages, Numbers, Google Chrome etc. Apart from this, documents can also be sent through to Automator workflows which support the format of the sent document. So for example, you can send a PDF to CloudApp’s ‘Upload with Cloud’ workflow. This will result in the document being sent to CloudApp while the URL for this document will be sent to your Mac. Thus, with Printopis 2.0 the possibility of virtual printing has emerged. Of course, the feature for printing physical printers is still there. You can also now set up password for both physical and virtual printers as well as settings for colors, paper size etc. Thus if you really want to exploit AirPlay on your iPhone and you own a Mac then Printopia is the app for you. You can get a demo version for free or purchase the full version for $19.95.

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