Cut the Printer Cord with Google Cloud Print

Posted 04/19/2010 at 5:33am | by Paul Lilly

4

Comments

Print

With every passing day, we're becoming increasingly mobile with our computing devices. Smartphones are getting smarter, portable PCs are getting more portable (netbooks come to mind), and now tablet computing is starting to take off. We're no longer tethered to our desktops throughout the day, but one thing that hasn't yet been addressed is how to print on the go. Enter Google Cloud Print, a new service Google is working on primarily for its upcoming Chrome OS, but could also see use in a variety of platforms.

"Since in Google Chrome OS all applications are web apps, we wanted to design a printing experience that would enable web apps to give users the full printing capabilities that native apps have today," Google's Chromium team wrote in a blog post. "Using the one component all major devices and operating systems have in common-- access to the cloud-- today we're introducing some preliminary designs for a project called Google Cloud Print, a service that enables any application (web, desktop, or mobile) on any device to print to any printer."

The way it works is pretty simple. Bypassing the need for local print drivers, apps can simply use Google Cloud Print to submit and manage print jobs. The online service will then send the print job to whichever printer the user selects, and then return the job status to the app.

Pretty sweet if you ask us.

Image Credit: Google