Expert’s Rating
Our Verdict
The AirPrint feature of iOS 4.2 promised to let you print , wirelessly , from your iOS twist to any printer shared by your Mac . unluckily , AirPrint ended up working with only a few specific , AirPrint - enable printers . One of the most popular recent Mac Gems , especially around the Macworld offices , isPrintopia , a utility that deliver on Apple ’s unfulfilled promise — and does much more .
Ioriginally go over Printopia a class ago . As I explained then , Printopia takes over where AirPrint leaves off , allow your Mac portion all or any configured printer , no matter how they ’re unite to your Mac , with iOS devices on your local wireless connection . In any iOS app that supports impression , you just tap the Print button , choose one of those printer , and mark ! And Printopia works with Mac OS X 10.7 ( Lion ) , 10.6 ( Snow Leopard ) , and even 10.5 ( Leopard)—and even with PowerPC Macs — making AirPrint available to anyone with a recent Mac . ( Your iOS devices must be head for the hills iOS 4.2 or later . )
But Printopia had a number of other whoremaster up it virtual sleeve that made the utility useful even if you never actually want to impress . A especial Send to Mac printing machine let you save — by print — a PDF copy of a document , or a JPEG or PNG version of an image , to a Printopia booklet in your Mac ’s Documents brochure . And a Send To Dropbox On Mac pressman let you save a document to your Mac’sDropbox ( ) folder , where the file is instantly synced to all your other Dropbox - enable devices . These features were heavy for , say , saving reception from on-line purchases made on your iPad or iPhone , and for transferring iOS screenshots to your Macs .
Since that recapitulation , Ecamm internet has secrete several significant updates to Printopia , includingversion 2.0 in Apriland version 2.1.5 before this workweek . Those update have include a routine of fresh features that have made Printopia even more useful . For example , you may now make an unlimited number of Save To Mac and Save To Dropbox virtual printers , each of them saving document to a different folder on your Mac or inside your Dropbox leaflet , respectively . You prefer which of those folder to save to by just choosing a different virtual printer when impress .
But my favourite newfangled feature is that you may set up Mac coating as virtual pressman and then “ print ” to them . Doing so sends a transcript of the document to your Mac and immediately opens the text file in the choose app . So , for lesson , you’re able to send an iPad screenshot to your favorite Mac image editor in chief , such as Acorn or Photoshop ; the screenshot opens in that program , quick for editing . Or you’re able to send a PDF directly from your iPhone to PDFpen on your Mac for annotation , or to Evernote for filing . ( In fact , if Evernote is installed on your Mac , Printopia automatically make an Evernote virtual printing machine for you . )
likewise , you may configure any PDF work flow — those options under the PDF come out - up menu in Mac impression dialogs — as a virtual pressman , letting youprocessdocuments you publish from your iOS gimmick . To use the screenshot example again , you could set up a PDF work flow that spread out an image in Preview , resize it to a particular size , and then saves it , as a PNG file , in your Website Images folder .
( Note that not every Mac programme supports multi - page documents . For example , if you send a four - Thomas Nelson Page document to an image editor , the program will likely display only the first page of the document . )
Also unexampled since my original review is password surety for each printer , real or virtual , so even if someone has memory access to your Wi - Fi meshwork , they ca n’t print to your printer(s ) , or save files to your Mac(s ) , without the appropriate password(s ) . Similarly , you may now configure default preferences for every printer . For real printers , this includes most of the preferences — newspaper size , newspaper handling , layout , output quality — you’d see in a Mac OS X printing dialog . For virtual printers , you could shift the name of the printing machine and , for save - to virtual printer , the save location and whether saved data file are open mechanically .
Another nifty new feature film is support for AirPrint printingfrom Lion . In other language , all the alternative available to iOS equipment on your local web are also usable to any Macs running Mac OS X 10.7 or later . Using the Print & Scan Lucy in the sky with diamonds of System Preferences ( or by select the printer in the Printer bolt down - up menu in any O X printing dialog ) , you may set up any Printopia - allow for pressman or practical printing machine as a standard OS X printing machine . So you get the same save - a - Web - reception - to - my - iMac and loose - a - screenshot - on - my - iMac features on your MacBook as you get on your iPhone .
This feature of speech has a dyad side benefit , as well . First , as long as your other Macs are running Lion , you could disable OS X ’s Printer Sharing feature and just practice Printopia — you do n’t need to practice Printer SharingandPrintopia to share your printers with both Macs and iOS machine . Second , if you ’ve got a printing machine that does n’t have Lion drivers , you may link the printer to a Mac die hard Printopia under , say , Leopard and then publish to that printing machine from any Mac running oxygen X 10.7 , instantly impart Lion musical accompaniment .
Ecamm has also desex a identification number of minor hemipteran , such as one that reduced the tone of print photos in sealed circumstances , and added some utilitarian tweak . For example , Printopia can mechanically fit your document to a each printer ’s printable area , and when mail a photo to your Mac , the date and time the photo was originally taken are used both in the lead file ’s name and to rig the date and metre of the Indian file itself . Printopia also now supports more pressman , it supports duplex apartment printing with particular printer models , and it works well with the OS X firewall .
As with the original version , Printopia ’s liberal restriction is that it requires that iOS devices — and , now , Macs run Lion — be on the same web with a computer that ’s on and alert . But until the Ecamm folk can work technical conjuring trick , that restriction will remain , just as it does for OS X ’s own Printer Sharing feature article .
Printopia was already one of our favourite bit of software , and with the improvements the developer has add together over the past year , it ’s even more of a must - have .
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