14 DAY TRIAL // Last year Google introduced a very interesting technology, Cloud Print. The promise was that you will be able to print on any printer in the world from any device in the world. Google has been building the service ever since and it has been bundled with Chrome for quite a while now.
It's now gotten an interface revamp and is available on both Windows and Mac. What's more, there are now plenty of devices that support Cloud Print out of the box, for example all of HP's ePrint devices do so.
"Last year, we launched Google Cloud Print, a service that enables users to print from any device, operating system, or browser to any printer without the need for drivers or a PC connection," Abhijit Kalamkar, Software Engineer at Google wrote.
"The service can be used with any printer, but the most seamless experience is offered by Google Cloud Print Ready devices, a new generation of web-connected printers that don’t need to be attached to a computer," he explained.
The Google Cloud Print connector, the tool that enables you to connect any printer to the cloud, has now been included in the latest Google Chrome 11 beta for Mac. It was already available in the Windows version, though Linux users are still left out.
The Cloud Print connector is shaping up quite nicely. It's still rather spartan, but it provides all of the basic functionality you need. There's a list of recent print jobs as well as printers connected to your account.
Of course, if you use a cloud-enabled printer, like the aforementioned ePrint series from HP, you can sidestep the need to have a recent version of Chrome installed on your computer.
But there's more, Cloud Print is already available in the mobile versions of Gmail and Google Docs, there's an Android app and both a Chrome and a Firefox extension. While it's not quite fully baked, you can expect a big Cloud Print announcement any time now.