Google Drafts Cloud Printing Plan For Chrome OS 126
snydeq writes "Google is unveiling early-stage designs, software code, and documentation for a project whose goal is to let users of the company's Chrome OS print documents to any printer from any application. Called Google Cloud Print, the technology would dispense with the need to install printer drivers by routing print jobs from Web, desktop, and mobile applications via a Chrome OS Web-hosted broker. 'Rather than rely on the local operating system — or drivers — to print, apps can use Google Cloud Print to submit and manage print jobs. Google Cloud Print will then be responsible for sending the print job to the appropriate printer with the particular options the user selected, and returning the job status to the app.'"
So, what is next? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:So Google invented.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Zero conf is the solution. Nearly every networkable printer these days has it.
I remember when I first got OS X and walked into a random computer lab, I instantly had all the printers available. Truly zeroconf.
Now my entire home network is zeroconf configured (oxymoron?). I stopped giving devices static IPs. The sheeva plug is plug.local, the mac is mac.local, open solaris is server.local.
ZeroConf+Postscript should be able to print to anything for sale today.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No. Hell No. (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, my printer (and yours too) don't have an outward facing IP and we don't port forward our routers to it either for exactly the reason you mention.
This wouldn't necessarily pose a problem.
Google for Domains customers can install a small app to go on a Linux server which communicates with them and allows you to integrate your systems with theirs. It gets around the firewall by the simple expedient of establishing the connection from the inside out. If you were to integrate that with Zeroconf - abracadabra! Any Google user can indeed print directly to all your printers.
I wouldn't be too surprised to see something like that built into Chrome OS.
Re:ahahahaha (Score:3, Interesting)
What won't it do to convince you that you need to do something half way across the world using systems under their control, what you once did perfectly in your office?
You've obviously never printed something remotely to Kinkos. That feature is convenient and can be a life-saver sometimes.
This doesn't mean that everyone will start printing remotely 100% of the time, but personally, I'd be glad to have this feature -- even if I only very rarely use it. If Google made it easy enough, I could see myself printing from my phone, from my television set up box, and whenever I'm away from my home or office, or my printer is broken, or my printer doesn't support the colors I want, the particular size, or the quantities of copies I want.
Also, this means that Google could lower the barrier of entry for every mom and pop printer store out there to be able to work like Kinkos, and this should facilitate economies of scales and reduce the cost of printing (Kinkos is nice, but its prices can really be high sometimes).
Re:What will they do next. .... (Score:3, Interesting)
I think perhaps the main point if this is being missed.
Does anyone remember Jini? It was the technology developed by Sun prior to EJBs that promised to make efficient distributed computing and pervasive connectivity a reality. Except, it never caught on because it required software development organizations to invert their staff profile. Instead of having a few device driver coders and enterprise architects, a few more low-level programmers and architect/designers, and the bulk of the staff in standard software development, Jini would have pushed the work to the outsides of that bell curve; nearly every developer would be playing the role of either device driver programmer or enterprise architect on most Jini projects. Recognizing this, Sun's compromise was EJBs, a distributed technology that brought half the functionality with perhaps 10x the weight.
Now we see that Google has rolled out a series of technologies that can all be combined to accomplish a similar vision: Google App Engine (cloud development platform), Chrome browser (thin client presentation layer), Google Apps (useful software including Docs, sensitive data hosting such as Health, etc), Chrome OS / Android (netbook/device hardware layer), and Wave (real time connectivity platform and protocol--the *product* most people think of as Wave is one possible manifestation of a front end to the Wave back-end and GWFP, but largely irrelevant for the purposes of the point I'm making here).
Laugh if you want, but demonstrating this bit about being able to host drivers in the cloud for any old device adds a necessary, though admittedly not particularly flashy, part of a fearsome distributed computing technology stack.
Re:So Google invented.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Printing sucks. Always has, always will. Just don't do it.
It's for this reason that I was a little disappointed about GDocs new "more paper-like" interface. I always figured people would do 95% of the work collaboratively and without real interest in formatting, and have on guy download and do final formatting only if the product needed it.
It seems that this new interface is going to encourage more time-wasting formatting debates and more useless printing.