Time to go ogle Google Cloud Print - if you're in the US

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 25 January 2011 12:20

Your IT - Mobility

Google Cloud Print has been around for about nine months. The gestational period is coming to an end, and 'ordinary people' are beginning to get access to the capability.

Google Cloud Print is Google's solution to the question of providing print facilities to web applications.

In Google's vision for cloud and mobile computing, there was a need for a printing mechanism that would allow printing from (potentially) any application running on any device to any printer. What wasn't going to work was having to install a model-specific print drivers before you could use a new printer.

So the idea is that applications (whether they're running in the cloud, on a mobile device, or on a conventional desktop or notebook computer) 'print' to Google Cloud Print, which takes care of outputting the job on the selected printer.

Other companies have their own approaches. For instance. a growing number of networkable HP printers use the ePrint system, which allows users to email documents to an address associated with an individual printer, and HP's servers take care of preparing the job for that model and sending it to the device. This arrangement works with a fair selection of file types - PDF is one of them, so practically any document on a computer can be printed providing a PDF driver is available. The use of ePrint with mobile devices depends on the apps being able to produce files that the service can handle (Microsoft Office, HTML, text, PDF, BMP, JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF).

Apple, on the other hand, has adopted a local (and more limited) approach with AirPrint. Primarily for the iPad, this software handles the discovery of printers on the wireless LAN, and then rather than requiring each device to have drivers for particular printers, it's up to the printers to meet the AirPrint specifications. At present, only HP offers models that do, although there are indications that a future version of Mac OS X will be able to act as an AirPrint proxy for attached printers. (The capability is present but hidden and disabled in Mac OS X 10.6.5 and 10.6.6, though there is a hack to turn it on.)

Please read on for information about using Google Cloud Print.