How to Print from your Cellphone or iPad

Portable computing devices and cellphones are great but they're lacking one huge ability, the ability to print. So in this post, I'm going to show you a quick work round hack that will allow you to print from almost any mobile device.

Now that we can acces the web from anywhere or anytime we want, the next step is to be able to print anywhere and anytime we want. Google has been working on a method of doing this but so far nothing yet has come to life. So here's a quick and dirty way to do it without having to wait on the search giant that's bent on taking over the world. The pc software that makes this work is drop box so you're going to need that installed both in the device that you want to print from and the computer that has the printer attach. There's ways to do this on Windows, Mac and Linux.

First off, you're going to need to put drop box on your mobile device. The basic drop box account is free and that's all we're going to need. So if you go to Dropbox www.dropbox.com click on mobile, you'll see that this is available ipad,iphone, android and black berry. If you have a windows mobile phone, you can use drop box which you can find here http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=687534  because it's a pretty close alternative.

Next go to the computer that has the printer installed and install drop box also, now here's where tha magic happens, To use the window tech blogger Amit Agarwall is written in the VBscript which you can download from e-print Zip file http://img.labnol.org/files/e-print.zip. It creates a folder in  drop box called PrintQueue and it watches the PrintQueue folder and prints whatever has put inside it and then it moves it to the log folder. To ensure that this script starts up whenever you restart your computer, you wanna go ahead and put it in your start up folder by click on > Start> All Programs> Start up> and just drag the sript in to the StartUp folder.

If you have Linux, you wanna manually create the PrintQueue folder and drop box and then make a batch script containing these lines:

        --- dropprint.sh ---

       

        #!/bin/bash

       

        export PrintQueue="/root/Dropbox/PrintQueue";

       

        IFS=$'\n'

       

        for PrintFile in $(/bin/ls -1 ${PrintQueue}) do

      

                lpr -r ${PrintQueue}/${PrintFile};

      

        done

      

        --- dropprint.sh ---

to check the PrintQueue folder for any new files and then send them to the printer. Then you wanna set a cron job to run this script every minute or so, so open a terminal, type CRONTAB -E and under the first line type 01**** and then type in the file path to your batch script.

If you have a mac, you wanna manualy create the PrintQueue folder and drop box and then open up Automater. From the Folder Action drop down menu, select your drop box PrintQueue Folder. Now search for Print Finder item and drag it to the workflow then search for Move Finder Item to Trash and drag it to the workflow as well.

Now after you save it, anything that's put into the PrintQueue folder will be send to the Printer and then moved to the trash.

After your computer is set, you're ready to start printing using your mobile device. Just upload and save a file to the drop box PrintQueue folder and it should start printing automatically from anywhere.