We snap all kinds of photos with our iPhone on a daily or almost-daily basis. We capture everything from our family to fancy meals out, friends, creative cocktail drinks, gorgeous landscapes, and nights on the town. That being said, we’ve got plenty of print-worthy photos in our iClouds, and now it’s time to bring some of those captures to light with one of the best photo printers for iPhone.

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There are a lot of high-quality mobile printers on the market, but none measure up to the Fujifilm Instax Mini Link. The pint-size printer works with your iPhone, best iPad, and even your Nintendo Switch. If you're a gamer who likes to celebrate achievements, you're going to love this printer. Grab a screenshot of the action, and through Fujifilm's app, you can edit and print those memories. You can do the same from almost any Bluetooth device. 

Photographers around the world adore Fujifilm colors for their vibrancy. The Mini Link keeps all the impressive Fujicolor magic, and images are editable within an app before printing.

This is a pricey printer, but it's worth every penny in our book. 

As much as our lives are immersed in digital documentation, there are still times when we need to print something, whether it's a document, an application, or a photo. If you're ready to revert to paper documentation, these are the all-around best printers for Mac.

Which printer should you choose?

Our best choice goes to the Epson EcoTank ET-2750 because of its great versatility. Not only do you get a serviceable printer, but you also get one that is efficient with how it handles ink with its unique replacement system. They don't use ink cartridges. Instead, they use low-cost replacement bottles that are easily refillable – this is a huge convenience.

If you don't have the coin to shell out for our top choice, then the budget-friendly HP OfficeJet 3831 is for you. It's good enough to handle day-to-day printing, scanning, and copying. Plus, it can also print from your iPhone without issue, thanks to AirPrint support. We can't forget to mention HP's Instant Ink program that saves you a ton of money when replacing your cartridges.

Connecting a printer to your PC or network doesn't mean you have to worry about finding the right cables and hooking everything up. Instead, why not use Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, or NFC for simple, clutter-free connections to all your devices? Check out the best wireless printers right here.

If we're making some suggestions

All of the above printers have a place in a particular home or office, but if you've gone through the list and still can't decide where to start, we have some suggestions.

If you need a well-rounded all-in-one printer that can handle your household's needs, check out the Canon PIXMA TS9550. It will print, scan, and copy, and is controllable with the 10.8cm touch display or multiple printing service apps. With paper support up to size A3, you shouldn't need to take your printing anywhere else except for large specialised jobs. Print 2-sided documents with ease and enjoy the front and back paper feeding trays that make it so convenient for you. You will get professional results whether you are printing for your work or a hobby.

If you print documents most of the time and don't need colour printing, then the Brother HL-L2350DW makes a perfect choice. It's a laser printer that will print 30 pages per minute in black and grey shades. Large documents are not a problem with its duplex capability and the built-in 250 sheet paper feeder. Send the print from wherever you are and pick up the materials at your convenience and, more importantly, it's relatively cheap. You can also connect via the USB for a local connection making it ideal for both work and home.

The Polaroid Mint Pocket Printer is an incredibly well made device that's simple to set up, print and produces glorious images with zero hassle and mess, and is both adorable and highly functional with it's awesome battery life and easy-charging capabilities.

• Easy setup
• Portable
• Mess-free
• Adorable
• Dependable

• A bit pricey
• Phone required

Instant printing made easy

Polaroid Mint Pocket Printer: Features

The Polaroid Mint Pocket Printer is truly an accessory to be reckoned with, and with so many different ways to edit and then print your memories before sticking them in a photo album or sticking them to a wall, this particular instant printer is a fun and highly functional, highly portable device that'll make you the life of the party.

Once you've downloaded the free Polaroid MINT app, you can connect your phone to the printer wirelessly via Bluetooth. From there, you can snap your images straight from the app, or pull up already taken images that you want to print. You can also edit and tweak your images before you print them, add various filters, and even overlay text and stickers onto your final masterpiece!

Not only is the Polaroid Mint Pocket Printer incredibly functional, but the device is also quite eye-catching and aesthetically pleasing. This particular pocket printer doesn't only print beautiful quality images, but it also looks terrific in photos with it's black, white, yellow, blue, and red color options.

Whether you're looking to spice up your vacation and capture some incredible snapshots on film, wanting to be the center of attention at the next house party, or want to give the gift that keeps on giving, and giving, and giving, the Polaroid Mint Pocket Printer is a terrific tool and photography accessory that's not going to let you down when you're making and editing and printing memories.

A step above the average

Polaroid Mint Pocket Printer: What I like

The Polaroid Mint Pocket Printer is an incredibly easy to use, portable instant printer without any mess that allows you to print high quality, sticker-like photos in 30 seconds thanks to its Zink paper, which uses heat-activated dye crystals and color layers within the paper itself instead of ink to print your images. Not only that, but unlike other instant printers, you shoot the image with your iPhone and have the opportunity to edit the heck out of it to make it perfect. As someone who loves photography and iPhone photography, this printer really is a dream come true for me.

Not cheap

Polaroid Mint Pocket Printer: What I don't like

The higher price tag isn't always the most appealing to people, and I can totally understand that, but it is a one-time buy of a wickedly functional instant printer. Want to know what isn't a one-time purchase? The paper. The Zink printer paper can get quite pricey if you're printing a ton of images every day.

Fun and creative photography tech

Polaroid Mint Pocket Printer: Bottom line

The Polaroid Mint Pocket Printer is one of the best instant printers out there for a variety of very good reasons: it's portable, it's easy-to-use, it's nice to look at… it's just a fantastic and functional photography accessory all 'round.

Chances are you won't be disappointed if you're spending your hard earned dough on this portable photography miracle, and I'm so happy that this insta-printer is so incredibly awesome. I mean, what else can you expect from the print masters at Polaroid?

See at Amazon

Both the Polaroid Zip and Polaroid Mint Printer are great options when it comes to wireless portable photo printers, especially when complementing an instant camera. The differences are fairly minor, but they are there, so let's go into more detail.

The Breakdown

On the surface, the Polaroid Zip and the Polaroid Mint are very similar to each other, with just a few minor differences.

Neither one is superior over the other in terms of printing quality since they both use ZINK "Zero-Ink" 2 by 3-inch paper and don't need ink, toner, or ribbons to print. They are both also fairly compact in size, so it's easy to take either of them anywhere, wherever you go. The best part is that both of them connect to your smartphone via the proper companion apps (Polaroid Zip or Polaroid Mint and Bluetooth.

The Polaroid Zip and Mint apps are also pretty similar to each other. These two apps are able to access the Camera Roll and Photo Library of your smartphone through Bluetooth. You'll be able to edit the photos with basic photo editing tools, add borders and frames, slap some fun stickers on, doodle on photos, or even make collages to your heart's content — all before you print.

The only real differences between these two portable photo printers are the size and how many photos they can print on a single charge. They're both compact and pocket-friendly, but their dimensions are slightly different. As you can see above, the Zip is compact, but is still bulkier than the Mint. And the Zip can only print 25 photos on a single charge, while the Mint can print out twice as many photos.

Honestly, we would go with the Polaroid Zip over the Mint Pocket Printer just based on price. They both use the same ZINK paper, connect to your phone via Bluetooth, and have free companion apps to give finishing touches to your photos before printing. We don't think most people would be printing out a ton of photos at once either, so the 25 picture limit on the Zip is fine. Sure it's bulkier, but it's still portable, and you'll save a good chunk of change.

During the 2000's and early '10's I worked in various IT departments. I still experience a small shiver down my spine and get a twitch in my eye when reminiscing about my days in corporate IT trying to give various network service support to my macOS clients in a Microsoft Windows-dominated world.

While most services on macOS had analogues for their Windows counterparts, printing on the big copier/printer/scanner machines proved much more tasking. Sure postscript might work depending on the copier (and that thanks was owed to CUPS from the open source world) but for our very few Mac users, printing onto machines designed to only work for Windows clients (our CFO found them to be much cheaper) was quite trying. But we managed it, and that's because regardless of what special features or doodads a printer may have, the underlying mechanism and functions are all the same. It's using this same principle that just might help you get your printer to work under macOS.

• Printing from macOS
• Download and install drivers
• Set up your printer with the closest match
• Final comments

Printing from macOS

Today with AirPrint and more ubiquitous macOS support you can just about print to any printer you can buy on the market. However, there still exist some printers that support Windows only clients. I for example have an older HP 1018 printer of which there is no official macOS support. But fret not! You just might be able to find a printer driver that is "close enough" for your printer to make it recognized on macOS. Here's how I got my HP 1018 laserjet printer to work.

Download and install the latest supported driver from HP

First, you'll need to get the latest drivers for all of the officially supported HP printers for macOS. Not from HP, but from Apple.

1. Navigate with Safari to the driver download.
2. Click Download.
3. Use Finder to navigate to your downloads.
4. Double click the HewlettPackardPrinterDrivers5.1.dmg file.

5. Double click the HewlettPackardPrinterDrivers package.
6. Click Continue.
7. Once again click Continue.
8. Click Agree to the license agreement.
9. Click Install.
10. Enter your password.
11. Click on Install Software.
12. Click done.

Set up your printer with the closest match

Luckily for us, HP tends to name it's various printers with similar feature sets with similar model numbers. So, for example, since I have an HP laserjet 1018 printer, I know that a similarly named HP laserjet like the HP laserjet 1010 or the HP laserjet 1022 may share some features with my 1018. So we try to find a best match by iteration until we get the features we absolutely want to work. Note that you may just only get printing working but extra features like duplexing or scanning might not function. But at least you can print. These instructions assume your printer is powered up and connected as expected by the manufacturer.

1. Go to System Preferences.
2. Select Printers & Scanners.
3. Click +.
4. Select the unsupported printer from the list.
5. Select Choose a Driver from the drop down list.

6. Click Select Software.
7. Search for a similarly named printer as yours. I have an HP laserjet 1018. I found other HP printers like the 1010, 1012, 1015 and 1022. Try to ensure that you get as close a match as possible.
8. Now we iterate. The plan is to try the first closest matching printer. Select that closest driver from the list.
9. Click OK.
10. Click Add.
11. Open up any text program or webpage and try to print a test page. If it works you're done! Otherwise you need to keep on iterating.
12. Delete the printer by clicking -.
13. Repeat steps 3 - 11 with the next similarly named printer model. In my case the printer for HP laserjet 1022 worked.

14. Done.

Final comments

As with any hack, success with this "close enough" strategy will vary by printer and by manufacturer. I also have to live with ignoring some the of the options that come with the 1022 that don't exist on my 1018 in the print dialogs when I print something. No matter. Working printer. Or, you can just buy a Mac supported printer like the HP laserjet 1022. What about you? Have a hack or tweak you want to mention? Lets know in the comments!

At the moment, I'm stuck using my cellphone's internet access as my personal hotspot for my various devices. Since my data plan has a data cap, I try to limit how long my laptop is connected to the internet. As much as I'm in a digital world, I still must print out various forms and documents on a weekly basis.

So what is one to do when you need access to a printer with no network? If your printer is AirPrint-compatible, you may be in luck!

• How to connect to your printer hotspot with your iPhone or iPad
• How to connect to your printer hotspot on your Mac

The art of networking without networking

Many AirPrint-capable printers have built-in wireless network adapters to connect to your Wi-Fi network. But did you know that many AirPrint capable printers will also create a "hotspot" for your devices to connect to? If you're stuck in a network-less zone, you can still print as needed depending on the situation. My HP LaserJet Pro 200 color Printer M251nw is one such printer that will allow you to connect to it via it's Wi-Fi hotspot, provide a DHCP address to your device, and allow you to AirPrint away.

How to connect to your printer hotspot with your iPhone or iPad

Here's what you do to get printer access without a true network.

1. Open your Settings app from your Home screen.
2. Tap Wi-Fi.
3. Under Choose a Network tap your printer name.
4. Tap Join This Network.

Once connected, you'll see Wi-Fi icon with an exclamation point in your network settings. This means that although your device has an IP address, it cannot connect to the internet from that connection. That's ok since we don't need internet access, just printer access. If you're on an LTE enabled device, you'll actually be able to connect to the printer via our faux-network connection, and to the internet via your mobile data connection. The best of both worlds in this scenario!

How to connect to your printer hotspot on your Mac

1. Launch System Preferences from your Dock or the Apple menu.
2. Select Network.
3. Select your printer under Network Name.

You'll see your Wi-Fi icon "struggling" to display it's connected symbol of solid black arcs. That's normal. You'll not have internet access, but you'll have access to AirPrint to your printer from any application running locally on your macOS device.

Where would you use this capability?

I'm using it while I have no home network. I can see people who have mobile offices such as construction workers needing the ability to print out schematics or appraisals without having to rely on a network in the field. Have you needed printer access without a network? Would this solution help you out? Let us know your story in the comments!

We've all run into a printing problem at one time or another. Sometimes a document gets stuck in the queue and won't print, or your Mac can't find your printer on your network.

Usually one of these steps will get things running smoothly again:

• Make sure the printer is properly connected either directly to the Mac or to the same network the Mac is using
• Update the printer driver software
• Delete and re-add the printer using the Printers & Scanners preference pane
• Restart the wifi router and/or printer

But occasionally, these simple fixes are not enough. That's when you have to bring out the heavy-duty tools.

There's a hidden command in macOS that will reset the Mac's printing system. Using it will clear out your list of devices that can print, scan, or fax from the Printers & Scanners preference pane and also do a bunch of behind-the-scenes housekeeping, the details of which you don't really need to worry about.

Because it should be used as a last resort, you won't find the command to reset the printing system in any of the Mac's standard menus, which makes it harder to invoke accidentally. But it's simple to do if you know how.

How to reset the printing system on your Mac

1. Click on the Apple menu icon.
2. Click on System Preferences.

3. Click Printers & Scanners.
4. Right or control-click in the list of devices on the left side of the window.
5. Click on Reset printing system....

6. Click Reset when prompted to confirm that you want to reset your entire printing system.
7. Enter the password for your administrative account if prompted.
8. Click OK.When the reset process is complete, the list of printers and scanners will be empty. You'll then want to re-add your printer.

9. Click the add button (it looks like a plus symbol).
10. If the list of options appears, click on your printer to automatically add it to your system.

11. If a window pops up instead, select your printer from the list of available options.
12. Click on Add.

The Mac will create your printer and add it to your list.

And now you have a fresh new printer, ready to expend countless dollars of ink on your behalf.

Any questions?

Do you have any printing problems that none of these steps can solve? Let us know in the comments and we'll try to help you out.

You've no need to muck about with printer drivers and software if you've got an Apple device and a printer that supports AirPrint (chances are you do) — with AirPrint you can connect to and print from your printer so long as both devices are connected to the same Wi-Fi network.

How to connect an AirPrint printer to your Mac

Because AirPrint works over Wi-Fi, you need to make sure your printer is connected to your Wi-Fi network before proceeding. Your printer will come with step-by-step instructions for connecting the device to your home Wi-Fi network — follow those steps first.

1. Make sure your Mac is connected to your Wi-Fi network.
2. Make sure your printer is connected to your Wi-Fi network.
3. Use the keyboard shortcut Command + P or choose File » Print from the Mac's menu bar.

4. Look at the Printer dropdown in the Print menu dialog. If it shows the name of your printer, you're good to go!
5. If it doesn't show the name of your printer, click the dropdown menu and look for your printer's name.
6. If the printer still isn't showing up, click Add Printer…

7. You'll see a menu appear. Look for your printer's name on the list and select it.
8. Make sure the Use: dropdown menu is set to AirPrint.
9. Click Add to add your printer.

10. You're good to go! All that's left is to Print from your new AirPrint printer!

Troubleshooting

If you run into any trouble whilst setting up your AirPrint printer, there are a few things you can try!

• Make sure you're running the latest version of macOS on your Mac and iOS on your iOS devices.
• Make sure your printer is updated to the latest software and firmware. Check your printer's user guide for information on updating your printer firmware.
• If you've got your printer connected to your Mac or to your network via USB, you're not going to be able to use AirPrint. You can't have your AirPrint and eat it USB, too.
• Make sure your printer is connected to the network. Also, make sure your printer is connected to the network. And don't forget to make sure your printer is connected to the network.

Questions?

Still struggling to get that AirPrint printer up and running? Let me know in the comments below and we'll try to get you set up!

This week's Mac Help column doesn't describe a problem with the Mac, specifically, though the Mac is integral to its solution. It involves a new iPad, an existing Mac, and printer support.

J.P. writes:

The short answer is no.

Let's back up for a moment: iOS devices work with printers that support Apple's AirPrint standard. A lot of newer printers do. Apple has a list of supported printers on its web site, but if your printer isn't on that list, don't panic. Because your Mac can help.

Assuming your Mac already works with the printer you're using, all you need to do is to install a third-party Mac app called Printopia, from Decisive Tactics (Ecamm created the software, but they sold it to Decisive earlier this year). Printopia is installed on a host Mac, and is accessed through the System Preferences. It doesn't make any changes to the iOS device at all — you don't have to install an iOS app or jailbreak or anything like that to get it to work.

Once installed, Printopia works with any printer that works on your Mac. It basically makes your Mac act like an AirPrint server, shunting off AirPrint print jobs to the Mac. That way, your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch can print to that printer, no native AirPrint required.

Printopia has a few other cool features worth mentioning, too: It can be configured to send files to Dropbox and Evernote. You can also use it as part of a workflow, so you can send images printed on your iOS devices to Adobe Photoshop, for example, or send PDFs of your files to Scrivener.

If you're an IT manager in an enterprise environment, you might also be interested in Decisive's industrial-strength version, Printopia Pro. It adds support for Wide Area Network (WAN) printing, directory services integration and much more.

A seven-day trial version is available for download from Printopia web site. Using it beyond that will cost you $19.99 (more for the Pro version). But that's considerably less than a new printer.

Today iOS 8 launches, and along with it, a whoooooole bunch of apps are being updated to support the new software. It's a veritable avalanche of updates, but we're going to dig up the very best ones for you. Give us a shout in the comments if you find any more!

iOS 8 app updates

• TextExpander - Set custom shortcuts (snippets) which expand to full phrases with this custom keyboard.
• Screens VNC - Use Touch ID and 1Password to unlock, and send rich text through a shared clipboard between devices.
• Transmit - Share files directly from your iPhone or iPad to your Amazon S3, FTP, SFTP, or WebDAV server.
• Epic Zen Garden - See what Metal graphics rendering can do with the tech demo.
• Slack - Share items directly to Slack channels and fellow collaborators from outside apps thanks to Extensions. Also gets 1Password integration.
• 1Password - Log into websites securely with a mere touch. Free for a limited time.
• Clear - View your latest tasks in the Today view.
• Camera Plus: Family Share pictures to other devices, haul in pictures for editing via Extensions, hop between devices for editing with Handoff.
• Instapaper: Read anything in a clutter-free environment thanks to Extensions. Saved articles show in Notification Center.
• TouchPal - A theme-friendly custom keyboard.
• Mint - Use Touch ID to access your personal finances.
• EyeEm - Follow friends and reply to comments on shared photos directly from notifications, and share pics for editing directly from the Photos app.
• OmniFocus 2 - Task manager lets you see what's next in the Notification Center. Also, shoot new tasks to the app through sharing Extensions.
• Facebook - Ubiquitous social networking app optimized for the iPhone 6's bigger screen.
• Color Keyboards - Stick close to the original keyboards, but add in your favorite colors.
• KuaiBoard - Use this custom keyboard to drop in chunks of preset text easily for those really repetitive e-mails and form letters.
• Yahoo Weather - Access the latest forecast from the Today widget.
• Dropbox - See latest activity in Today widget, plus new sharing controls for Pro and Business users.
• Minuum - A resizable keyboard perfect for those sticking with the smaller screen.
• Finish - Complete or stall tasks from the Notification Center.
• Swype - Another fantastic custom keyboard that focuses on gestures.
• Wdgts - A whole collection of useful notification tray widgets.
• Pocket - Handoff support lets you keep reading where you left between devices, and add new stories directly through Safari thanks to Extensions.
• Simple - Get access to your banking information through Touch ID.
• Find my Friends - Apple's location-sharing app can now move your friends list to iCloud.
• Find my iPhone - Now ties in with iOS 8 Family Sharing.
• iTunes U - Automatically add assignment due dates to calendar.
• Retro - Instagram viewer for iPad adds Today widget for keeping tabs on timeline and adds 1Password integration thanks to Extensions.
• Day One - Today widget offers flashback to previous entries, Extensions allow for easy importing from other apps, and Touch ID enabled to unlock.
• Evernote - Save notes with Notification Center widget, and clip content from all over with Extensions. Touch ID unlock for premium users.
• Badland - Visual optimizations for iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus screen size.
• Vimeo - Easier uploading and sharing thanks to Extension support.
• Asphalt 8 - Exclusive iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus season plus switch to Metal graphics engine.
• SwiftKey - Hugely popular custom keyboard finally on iOS.
• Fleksy - One of the first custom keyboards for iPhone.
• OpenTable - Notification Center widget to let you know about upcoming reservations.
• Fragment - Resume editing between devices using Handoff.
• Endomondo - HealthKit integration and interactive notifications for challenge requests.
• Microsoft OneNote - Clip all sorts of content to the cloud with new Share Extension.
• Buzzfeed - Catch the latest from the Today widget and bookmark from notifications.
• Box - Access Box files in other apps thanks to new Document Provider extension.
• Duolingo - Lesson progress widget added to language-learning app.
• pCalc - Quick calculation widget added.
• Snapguide - Recipe and home decor app adds iCloud Drive integration.
• Redfin - Real estate reference adds Today widgets.
• MyFitnessPal - Fitness tracker adds HealthKit integration.
• App in the Air - Flight tracker adds widgets.
• Amazon - Online shopping app adds Touch ID signin option.
• Carrot Fit - Fitness tracker adds HealthKit integration and iPad support.
• Pinterest - Pin to your collections from Safari, support bigger iPhone screens.
• Calendars 5 - Check your schedule with a new Today View widget.
• Scanner Pro - Can now scan photos directly from the photo library thanks to Extensions.
• PDF Expert - Zoom Writing, AirTurn support, bookmarks management and iOS 8 exclusive features.
• Documents 5 - Open, view, and edit files stored in iCloud Drive.
• Printer Pro - Wirelessly print documents from your iCloud Drive.
• PDF Converter - Save iCloud Drive files in other formats as a PDF locally.
• LastPass - Safari extension for remembering passwords and Touch ID integration.
• Sky Guide - Sunrise, sunset, and lots of other information available in a Today widget.

New iOS apps

• Goat Simulator: Achieve a trans-species nirvana in the greatest sim game of all time. - $4.99 - Download now

Discounted iOS apps

• Numerics: Business statistic visualizer. $19.99 Free - Download now

Other iOS app updates

• Ascension: New Darkness Unleashed expansion available for this dark fantasy card game. - Free, IAPs - Download now
• Rules!: Two new game modes added to this memory-testing puzzle game. - $1.99 - Download now
• Real Racing 3: Classic Lamorghinis added in this beautiful racing gaming. - Free, IAPs - Download now
• Snipp3t: Catch celebrity Tweets and Instagram pictures from within the app. - Free - Download now
• Twitch: Chromecast support added to help you watch live video gameplay on the big screen. - Free - Download now

The built-in Notes app makes it easy to take down quick notes, memos, thoughts, or any other bits of text you want to keep handy on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. It also makes it easy to share those notes, memos, thoughts, and other bits of text with your friends, family, and colleagues via AirDrop, Messages, Mail, or even print it out and hand it to them with AirPrint.

• How to share Notes on iPhone and iPad
• How to print Notes on iPhone and iPad

How to share notes on iPhone and iPad

1. Launch the Notes app from the Home screen of your iPhone or iPad.
2. Tap on the note you want to share or print.
3. Tap on the Share button.
4. Choose how you want to share your note: AirDrop, Message, or fMail.

How to print notes on iPhone and iPad

1. Launch the Notes app from the Home screen of your iPhone or iPad.
2. Tap on the note you want to share or print.
3. Tap on the Share button.
4. Tap on the Print button.
5. Choose the options you want and tap Print.

Back to the top

Every day dozens and dozens of new and updated apps and games hit the iOS and Mac App Stores. It's impossible to keep up with them all, but it's not impossible to pick out the very best. Here they are! Today we've got new music apps, travel tools, workout stuff and more!

New and updated iOS apps

• Shazam 7.6.1: Identify music and TV by letting Shazam sample it. Links to iTunes, even. This version has minor bug fixes. Free - Download now
• Hipmunk 3.3.4: Plan your next trip by comparing top travel sites. Now optimized for iPad, works better with Airbnb and HomeAway, easier to reset your password. Free - Download now
• Swarm 1.0.5: The new app from Foursquare, keep up and meet with your friends. Checking in is faster in this version, and location accuracy has been improved. Free - Download now
• Fitbit 2.3: The companion app to the fitness wearable. Track your activity, workouts and health. New MobileRun lets you use GPS to track your pace and routes; track food faster with a barcode scanner, calorie estimator and expanded food database; track exercise easier; and more. Free - Download now
• Dayflow: Plan your day more efficiently by managing activities, get suggestions for what to do next, plot efficiency and examine your day using a summary. $2.99 - Download now
• Amazon Music: Amazon's free music streaming service for Amazon Prime members. Improved stability, simplified sign-in process, fixes for "Exception 47." Free - Download now
• Pocket 5.5.2: Save articles, videos and more. Minor bug fixes and improvements. Free - Download now

New and updated Mac apps

• Printopia 2.1.10.2: Turn any printer into an AirPrint printer that works with your iOS devices, or AirPrint to PDF instead. Fixes compatibility with 10.10 Developer Preview, fixes Send to Dropbox, other minor changes. $19.95 - Download now
• Sound Studio 4.6.12: Audio recording and editing tool. Fixes crashing problem on Mac Pro, fixes sample rate popup. $29.99 - Download now
• Paragon NTFS for Snow Leopard: Enables you to easily share files with Windows users over the same network. The version for Snow Leopard is now free. Free - Download now

More apps and updates?

If you try any of the apps or updates, let me know how they work for you. If you got any new or updated apps today that you loved, but don't see here, let us know about them!

AirPrint is a great feature that lets the iPhone or iPad print to any compatible printer right over Wi-Fi, no awkward cables or frustrating drivers required. Unfortunately, not every printer is AirPlay compatible, especially older printers. So what can you do? Easy, just get a copy of Ecamm's Printopia and start using any printer as an AirPrint printer!

How to get started with Printopia

There are two versions of Printopia for you to choose from. One is for personal home use while the other is geared more towards corporations and schools. Make your choice and then purchase one or the other. Start with the one week free trial if you aren't sure which one suits your needs best.

• $19.95 - Printopia - Buy now
• Starts at $79 - Printopia Pro - Buy Now

Not only can you print directly to any printer from Printopia, you can also share anything you print to Dropbox, Evernote, and many other services. If you want things stored to a specific folder on your Mac you can do that too. For Printopia to work, just be sure your printer is connected to your Mac and that it's selected to be shared in the Preferences pane of your Mac, like pictured above. You can connect your printer either via a hard wired connection or through WiFi. Printopia should recognize either.

How to use AirPrint with Printopia

Once you've got Printopia installed and running on your Mac, there's nothing to install on iOS. It works the same way AirPrint would. Just choose a print option inside almost any app that supports printing. Not only should you see official AirPrint enabled printers, you should also see any printers shared within Printopia as well as options to send to your Dropbox, a folder on your Mac, and any other options you've configured.

Essentially the options for Dropbox, Evernote, and folders on your Mac are just a super convenient way to transfer documents back and forth using the native Print dialog that's already built into iOS. As long as you're on the same WiFi network and Printopia is running on your Mac, you're good to go!

If you've given Printopia a try, let me know in the comments how you use it. Has it removed the burden of having to find AirPrint compatible printers?

iOS offers a variety of photo printing apps like Free Prints and PostalPix. But until now, none of them bore the illustrious Kodak name. That changes today with the release of Kodak Moments HD for iPad. With Kodak Moments HD, users can easily create high quality photo books and prints using photographs from their iPad or social media sharing sites. And unlike competing apps, Kodak allows users to choose from both ship-to-home and same-day in-store pickup options.

One of Kodak Alaris’s goals in creating Kodak Moments HD was to make the app extremely easy to use. First-time users can follow a video tutorial, but the creation process is so simple that most of us could figure it out on our own.

Making the perfect photo book

Kodak Moments HD allows users to buy individual prints or create attractive photo books. Let’s look at the process of designing a photo book from start to finish.

The first step in creating a photo book is to choose between designing the book “anytime, anywhere” or doing it in-store via Kodak Kiosk. Next you select the size and delivery method. Kodak offers several different sizes of books, each with a specific number of pages included in the price. The books are surprisingly affordable too – they range from $5.99 all the way up to $29.99.

After choosing the kind of book you want, the fun part begins: choosing pictures! You can select images from Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, or your iPad’s photo stream. The Kodak Moments HD’s Smartfit Technology preserves the content of pictures regardless of their size, optimizing them for the book size you’ve chosen. Users can apply effects and enlargements directly from the app as well.

Although you can get by with one photo per page, Kodak Moments HD also allows for multiple photos on a page. As you select photos, the app will tell you whether you’ve chosen too many or not enough.

Having chosen all of your photographs, it’s time to select a background for your pages. The app offers 60 backgrounds in a variety of themes. Kodak Alaris will add more backgrounds over time as well.

Finally, you can name the book and its author and then save the project.

If you’ve chosen in-store pickup for your book, you’ll also need to find a kiosk from which to pick it up. Kodak Photo kiosks can be found within a number of retailers and drug stores, including Target, CVS, and Bartell Drugs. I found numerous kiosks using the Kodak Kiosk Store Locator on the web.

More Kodak printing to come

Kodak Moments HD is a great way to design photo books in the comfort of your home. It has been designed to take advantage of the iPad’s large size and drag-and-drop functionality. The ability to get your photobook shipped to you or simply pick it up in-store is especially convenient.

The only complaint I can see about Kodak Moments HD is that it doesn’t offer a very wide range of photo products at present. You can choose between photo books and individual prints, but that’s it. Luckily, Kodak Alaris plans to add additional products in the future, such as customized greeting cards, photo collages and calendars. Those extra options should make Kodak Moments HD a must-have for digital photography enthusiasts.

Kodak Moments HD is compatible with iPad 2 and later devices running iOS 7.0.1 or later.

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When Apple introduced AirPrint to iOS, they made it incredibly easy to send files right from your iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad to any compatible Wi-Fi printer in the vicinity. Unfortunately, what Apple didn't do was bring Print to PDF (Export as PDF) along for the ride. At least, not yet...

One of the great features of OS X on the Mac is exactly that — the ability to export almost anything and everything quickly and easily to a PDF file. It's something I've mentioned in the past when discussing OS X Mavericks features that'd be great to see in iOS 8. It's my understanding Print/Export to PDF was in the pipeline years ago, but simply never got polished and pushed out.

Apple's engineers already put in long hours and tremendous effort, and there's an opportunity cost to everything. Working on feature A means the same person or team can't be working on feature B at the same time. Priorities. Trade-offs. Focus. That's how software development works. It could well be that Print/Export to PDF wasn't considered a priority, or something that enough of Apple's customers would use or benefit from. Or it could simply be sitting in the queue, patiently waiting its turn in the tentpoles.

Either way, I'd still like to see it in iOS. Sure, there are screenshots that can capture the pixels on the display, there are Share sheets that can grab content as-is and send it on its way, and there are Print to PDF apps in the App Store that offer some form of the same functionality. But the ability to take any page of text and images, in any app, and quickly, easily, turn it into a PDF? That's be the kind of magic we've come to expect from Apple.

See something, make something, want it wrapped up nicely and neatly? Tap Share, tap Print, tap PDF, store it up on iCloud or Share it by any of the usual methods. That'd be a great bullet point on Keynote. If you think so too, please join me in letting Apple know just how much we'd appreciate Print to PDF in iOS 8!

David Gelphman, former graphics and imaging engineer at Apple, talks to Guy and Rene about writing the book on Core Graphics, developing AirPrint, and discovers Montreal has bagels (Part 2 of 2).

Here's the audio, again, in case you missed it. And now, for the first time, here's the full transcript!

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Debug 16.1: David Gelphman on Apple, Core Graphics, and AirPrint transcript

• Continued from part 1

Rene Ritchie: Previously on Debug with David Gelphman.

David Gelphman: Peter Grafanino, who was one of the next people that came over, he had been a graphics guy. Actually, he was the person that I remember people at Adobe working with, among others, on the next software. When they were doing display postscript. Peter, who I think is a super brilliant person. Basically, we had gotten an offer from Apple. Apple basically said, "Hey, we're not going to be able to continue to pay you contracting dollars. You're the number one contractor, dollar wise."

Saying to RBI, "We want you to come and work for us instead of work as contractors." That's what we ended up doing. Not everybody, but most everybody came to Apple as employees in June of 2000.

Rene: And now.

David: I quickly found an amazing group of people in the graphics team. There are the people that worked on the windows server 2D graphics. There is color sync which was integrated into quartz 2D. Quick Draw was part of that team, but Quick Draw was sort of just keep it going is what quick draw was at that point. Peter later acquired Quartz composer software pixel shocks which got integrated into macro OS.

He was the person behind the compositing windows server. I don't mean he was behind the code I mean the notion of having a Windows server and having it be a compositing windows server was a really daring move.

Guy: Amazing, so when they yanked displayed post script the thing that I did love was the compositing windows because that was a huge bet. I was writing video games at the time, and you can see how that was a bet on the way that GPUs accelerated texture blitters basically. We were going. Where you would render client-side into your texture and you'd upload the texture or just what changed in the texture and then be able to composite it on the curve. In 2000 that didn't really fully pan out.

David: Well, That wasn't the way it worked in 2000. It took a while before they really had it...

Guy: From having done GPU programming, I could see that this was the way it was going. This just makes total sense. I think that was a real good bet. It was one of those skate to where the puck is going sort of moments.

David: I absolutely agree with you, Guy. Absolutely. There was a lot of that. I really do. Peter was partly behind core animation which turned out to be a huge thing for both iOS and also on Mac OSX.

Guy: Core animation is kind of the next logical step from the composited Windows server, in a way.

David: Yeah. His team, he had 2D graphics on his team, 3D graphics, he had acquired a 3D graphics company that did GL graphics and brought them to the company. Prior to that, there was QuickDraw 3D. They got GL Graphics and QuickDraw 3D was deprecated pretty quickly. It was a pretty amazing technology and people. When I first arrived, it was really very different than working and, by the way, I worked with a lot of really smart people at RBI. It's just people at Apple is just another level, totally.

We came in because the printing teams, such as it was at the time, they needed help and they knew a lot about printing, so we basically ended up becoming a printing team over time. That's what I was doing primarily at Apple during my years at Apple. Because I was the graphics guy on the printing team for the most part, I did a lot of core graphics work.

When I look back over my career, you know, I sort of was thinking about talking with you guys and I look back at my career and it's like all of this sort of just came together right at the time that I started at Apple because I had this great background in PostScript, PDF imaging model.

Here we had basically that graphics system was the graphics system on the Mac. We got to build the printing system around that. The metafile format for the printing system instead of being PICT, which is what it had been in the old OS 9/8 days or whatever, was now PDF. Just making PDFs out of printing was like a standard part of printing.

Guy: Save As PDF is one of my favorite features, actually.

David: It is. There are some other things that got added over time. Rich came over to Apple at the time I did. He added this PDF workflow stuff where you can send your PDFs from the printing system off to other applications. Some of them are built in ones, like mail or whatever, but you can build a workflow where the PDF from the printing system gets sent to you and you can do something with it. That's pretty cool. I arrived at Apple and they needed help with stuff related to postscript generation for the new graphics system, which was the perfect fit for me.

Using CG immediately was just straight forward, partly because it's a great API, Derek Clegg, who is really pretty much the person responsible for that at Apple, really good API designer. It's a very clean, very well done API. I did a lot of code related to CG, that used CG internally, and some code for CG in the core graphic system. I thought, if you're interested, I'll tell you a little about how my book came about.

Guy: I was just going to say, you were the guy that wrote the book on the CG API just to set you up anyway.

David: I was actually pretty dissatisfied with the documentation at Adobe, sorry, too many As in here. That Apple was doing for the core graphics API, especially in the early 2000s. Coming out of a DTS world from Adobe, I come from a developer focused point of view, a lot. I looked at documentation. I'm like, "There's not enough."

Guy: It was standard to joke about it. What was it, description forthcoming, the most common description for method.

David: Do you feel like that's the case today?

Guy: No, they do a terrific job today. There are obviously spotty errors, but they do.

David: Nobody's perfect, but it's changed a lot. Part of that is just through Apple's success. They've put more focus on the documentation. I didn't feel like that was the case at that point. Really what happened is that coming over from outside Apple, a book that a third party was writing working with O'Reilly. They asked us at Apple to take a look at it and give some feedback on the book. Somebody gave it to me because I'm sort of a weenie in this way. I'd worked a lot with the documentation people at Apple, the printing docs and just in docs in general, also feedback on the core graphics documentation. I looked at what this person was doing with the book and I didn't like it. For me, it wasn't what I would like to see. I gave that feedback and I was just thinking, "Well why try and help somebody make a book that is the right book, why put all that effort in?"

Stupidly I thought, "Why not just write it?" I have to give just a tremendous amount of credit to the management at Apple for letting me do that.

Guy: It was really notable that a developer on a pretty important system was actually writing a book about it.

David: Is that the way it was perceived outside Apple? I had no idea.

Guy: To me it was. I didn't know that you worked there. It's uncommon for people to communicate in that way. It's not like you spill any beans, right?

David: No, no. That was carefully crafted to not do so. I can tell you a little bit about that if you're interested. It wasn't to write the inside story of how to use core graphics if you weren't using public API, it wasn't anything like that. It was how to use the public API. What was the imaging model? How to use the public API? How to solve specific problems that people have? For me, that's the way I looked at it.

Guy: The must have reference book.

David: Thank you.

Guy: I'm trying to plug it for everybody. Everybody go out and buy it.

David: I appreciate that. It's a little long in the tooth because it was published at the end of 2005.

Guy: The thing about the imaging model is still dead on.

David: All of that's still there, and they're still kind of useful. It has legs longer than maybe some books would. Obviously, if you were going to update it, there would be a lot of material. This was in 2005. This was right at the time that Intel based Macintoshes were hitting the market. It was well before the iPhone and iPad. It was a different world.

Guy: I mean so the particulars of using like a, whatever, like a CG layer may not be as important these days or have the same sort of effect, but the concepts are all still the same. You know what I mean? I think if you read that book and understand how this stuff works, then when you see new stuff you can understand how that works.

David: It's good you feel that way because that was certainly the goal of...I didn't want to write one of these books where you build a fake application. That's what that other book was, and I didn't like it. I like the idea of, "Here are the concepts, and here's some code. Here's how you write the code to do specific things," and the specific things are real-world tasks that people need to do like render to bits and then do something with those bits and that kind of stuff.

I do want to say something about Bunny and a little bit about how the book came about, because Bunny Laden, who's the co-author of the book with me. Bunny is somebody who I had worked with. She worked in the documentation group and was terrific, and I had worked with her on the printing documentation in that I was the person representing the printing team in terms of how the API worked and so on, and Bunny was working on drafts, or whatever. I worked with her.

She was and is unbelievable in terms of both her writing skill and just how great she is to work with. I would make all kinds of comments about stuff that I didn't like about some piece of documentation she'd done, and I wasn't mean about it. I just, "This wasn't right or this..." whatever.

And there are some people who get defensive about that, and Bunny is not all that way. She'd just take it great. This is great information. She'd turn it, and was great. And so when I had the chance to work with her on the book it's the only way that I would actually work to do that book was to do it with her.

Now what ended up happening -- and I did -- but what ended up happening is I had somehow imagined this process would be like I would work with her on how what was going to be in the chapter, and so on and so forth, but I thought she was going to do most of the writing, because she was the writer.

But she didn't get the permission from her management to spend the kind of time on that book that I did. I got to spend a lot of time on that book, at least three-quarters of my time during the period of time I was working on it.

Guy: That's great.

David: I had a really great management chain.

Guy: Yes.

David: I was really lucky, you know? Let's just say it's the inverse from the experience I had working at Adobe where the management changed maybe wasn't as easy to come up with a solution like that. Peter Graffagnino and Rich Blanchard, who was my manager at the time, they were like, "Yeah, do it. This is great." I wrote most of the text in that book, and Bunny, who was just critical for sort of organizing things better than I could organize them, really great ideas about some things to put in or take out, or whatever. Once I wrote the prose to turn it into something better than it was when I wrote it. But I ended up writing a lot more than I expected to, to be honest. If I'd known what it was going to take to do that book beforehand I might not have taken it on, because it was a lot, a lot of work.

But it was really satisfying. I mean it was really satisfying. The UPS guy pulls up, or FedEx. FedEx brings the first copy of the book from the publisher, the first from the print run, and that was an amazing experience to have that in my hands, because I thought they'd done a brilliant job of making it look nice and just to have that after all that work, because it took a while.

Guy: It must be satisfying. It's like after writing software for so many years, having something physical in your hand that you're...

David: It was really different. A lot of people are involved in the final product for the book, because there's printing, and there's formatting. We didn't give them camera-ready anything. They did the design and all of that. But it's much closer to, OS, Snow Leopard comes out, you have a piece of that, but this book came out I had just an enormous piece of it that was just me. I was very pleased with it, and I got very good feedback. I still get some nice comments from people about it, "Well, it was an expensive book. I waited to buy it. I don't know why I waited to buy it." Now they got it. How much it cost that had nothing to do with me.

I do have a little story about how my name ended up being on that book, because it wasn't going to be. Bunny and I, when we started that book, that book was going to be author, Apple.

Guy: Oh, really?

David: It wasn't going to be out on Amazon.

Guy: Interesting.

David: We knew that, when Steve came back to Apple that was the policy. It was the same policy for the software, that there were no names on programs within OS. All that stuff went away. That's fine. I mean I wasn't writing the book for people to know my name. I was writing the book because I wanted third-parties to know how to program Quartz. And well, not just third-parties, people within Apple, too, but that's another matter [laughs] .

What happened is we got down to the very, very end, we're all done, everything's turned in, all the artwork had been approved - we thought - and I thought we were all done. Then I guess they needed to have product marketing sign off on the cover.

Now the cover design for that book it's got a crystal on it, which we had gone through a lot of different ideas for the cover, whatever. Morgan Kaufmann, the publisher, had come up with this, what I thought it was a really cool-looking graphic of a crystal, so quartz that seemed like that sort of fit.

Guy: Do you know where that code name came from? I've never understood that.

David: That's a good question. I don't know.

Guy: I've got to find out.

David: I might be able to.

Guy: Yes. Somebody write in and tell me where Quartz came from. Anyway, sorry, go ahead.

David: I'd be curious. I know some people I could ask. I've never actually asked that question. Internally it probably was a product marketing thing, because internally it was known as Core Graphics. All these things had the internal name, and then they decided to call it Quartz. I don't know where that came from. It was already called that when I got to Apple. We're at the end of the line. I mean I'm just like, "Oh, thank god we're all done. This is a big, long project." And somebody in the product marketing group sent an email out, and they were complaining. They said, "What is that turkey drumstick graphic that you're talking about using for the cover?"

I'm like, "Oh, god." And this is somebody that I'd some involvement with before who had never been helpful. And it just set off this whole, "We can't have it." Now all of a sudden the people in product marketing got involved, because, "We can't have Apple's name associated with this thing that's not a perfect graphic." It was that kind of thing.

Guy: I guess.

David: And you can imagine when the publisher's trying to meet their deadline for publishing it and for me after all this work, and Bunny, a lot of people, and we had thought we had had all this permission worked out. Anyway, the solution ended up being somebody, I assumed it was Bertrand Serlet, went to Steve and said, "Here is this problem. Can we put the names of the people who wrote the book on the cover? So that it doesn't have to say it was authored by Apple"? That was the solution, and the answer was OK.

Sorry, bad choice of letters there, I guess [laughs] . But the answer was yes. I was thrilled of course to have my name on it. That that turned out to be the solution to this intractable problem was fine with me and Bunny. Both of us were perfectly fine. To me, it was funny. It wasn't funny during the process. I'll say that.

Guy: Yeah, I'm sure.

David: [laughs] It was funny by the time we got to the point of our names are going to be on this. Totally unexpected [inaudible 19:01] .

Guy: It's like the inverted credit system.

David: [laughs] We don't like the graphic for the front, so put the authors' names on it. Let them be responsible for that [laughs] .

Guy: That's awesome.

David: I don't want to say the right thing happened in the end. I don't know.

Guy: No. If you're writing a book, and it's not being published by Apple, it's totally fair to put your name on it as the author.

David: But it was never published by Apple. It was published by Morgan Kaufmann.

Guy: That's what I mean. [inaudible 19:33] press. The thing, at one point, it used [inaudible 19:35] .

David: No, it's not. They used to have a press. This was not an Apple press thing. That's long gone.

Guy: If you're going out to the Apple press, fine, Apple. If you're not, it's unfair.

David: This had happened before with other people where they are writing books internal to Apple, and they didn't get their names on it. Some people were unhappy about that. I can understand that. I just knew going in that we weren't going to have our names on it.

Guy: I think that's it. Once you know going in, you signed up for it.

David: That's exactly right. I had signed up for it. That's OK. I felt very gratified to have my name on it. When I got one in my hands, I thought they did a beautiful job of printing it. But Apple owns it all. This isn't something I get royalties for. It's Apple's book. If I wanted to do a revision of it, I would have to work that out with Apple.

We've been asked by the publisher, "Did we want to do a revision"? Because it's older, there's a lot of good stuff you could put in it now. The world's changed. There are so much more information now out there about Apple, about the graphic system. Other people are doing some really fine work.

It's a major project to update that book. I don't think that's coming anytime soon. I don't think I'm likely to do that. But I'm glad that it still has a lot of utility.

Guy: It's a terrific introduction to the, what I can't stop calling, the postscript imaging model. Is there a better name for that? PDF?

David: The reason people refer to it as a PDF imaging model is because it's evolved. It now has compositing operations built in, not the kinds of compositing that NeXT built into to add to display postscript, but different ways blending graphics. It has blend modes now. That's not something that ever got added to postscript. That actually adds quite a lot of computational difficulty to rendering the graphics. It has added another layer of sophistication. Let's put it that way.

Guy: From now on, I should call it PDF imaging model? That's your...

David: I tend to say postscript, but I'm an old...

Guy: School.

David: It's postscript PDF. The basics of the imaging model are still postscript.

Guy: To me, it's that whole thing: The origin's in the lower left corner.

David: Yeah, all of that.

Guy: You draw from the middle of a pixel. Man, you must remember when OS X shipped, everybody was going aped because they had to draw on the middle of a pixel to get a one pixel thick line. Now with the retina screen, guess what? It's working pretty good for you now, isn't it?

David: The real thing is at this dimension, in the early 2000s, this is some that Peter was trying to pursue, I was so, so excited about the idea of high DPI displays. I really thought, "God, we are missing the boat. We have this great imaging model. If we can push the displays to higher resolution, it's going to be a big selling point for Macintosh." I really wanted to see that effort succeed. Really what happened is just the hardware wasn't there. Maybe it's going to be expensive for the displays. Maybe the displays were but the GPU hardware...The stuff wasn't to the level that it needed to be to get that performance. It wasn't the big focus. Now, retina graphics is like, "Oh, my God." You use it on iPad, or you use a...

Guy: That's a jackpot.

David: It's just the quality that's so fabulous. They found a good way to do it, to not make all the developers to suffer greatly which would have been the case if, instead of having 2X scale factor, if you add the possibility of 1X or...

Guy: 1.5 or whatever.

David: Exactly.

Guy: I like the idea of that, but it felt like it was never going to work.

David: That's exactly right. I really want to see this, but everybody was going to have to rework. Nothing is going to look good unless you ran it 2X. It just wasn't going to look good. There are too many difficult things. If you look in the book, I had some stuff about that because I was anticipating that we were going to do this. In core graphics, there were routines. I wrote some about it in the book. Sometimes you had to this in your postscript code if you wanted some of the graphics...

Guy: To figure out the width of a single line, you have to do a bit of...

David: Not just that. If you wanted to land your graphic and if you wanted to land your pen at the right place in the pixel in user space, you have to calculate it in the device space, and then transform it back into user space. It was that kind of stuff, and they put in some functions in core graphics to let you do that. There's a little bit of code in the book about how to do it. But it was going to be a lot of work for developers. It's pretty much for free for most people. Yes, there are developers who were doing some things where they were doing some maybe pre-rendering off-screen.

Guy: Yeah, I had a bunch of issues with an app.

David: But people had figured it out pretty quickly.

Guy: Also having two modes makes it a lot nicer, like you don't have to figure out anything in between. One thing that is funky is having screens like one screen at 2X and one screen at 1X. That gets a little crazy. Well, math works it out.

David: Some of that, like with color management, that was another kind of thing because there's a lot of stuff in core graphics to let you draw using color managed workflow. Guess what? Your display color space maybe different between the two displays you've got. If you really wanted to do some careful work, you might have to take that into account. Hopefully not, hopefully, you're drawing in a calibrated space, and all the math is done for you. But people do a lot of things which aren't, and you can end up with some surprises.

Guy: It's a very difficult problem space to solve elegantly. Mostly it's done really, really well on OS X and iOS.

David: In iOS, you have the benefit of not having a second display [laughs] .

Guy: Exactly. I don't just mean the color space.

David: You mean the general problem?

Guy: I mean the general problem, like an imaging problem, is difficult. It got nailed really well on OS X originally. It scaled to the point that you can take that similar approach and stick it on the iPhone one. The way that it renders on the host into texture and then composite stall was just really forward looking and very smart step to take.

David: The technologies that got built into the OS in the early stages of OS X absolutely led to what was possible on the iPhone.

Guy: Yeah, except it led to most of the complaints, right? It was just like resizing a window just takes forever. It's like, "OK, just wait for it. Just give it a few years. I know it's going to be painful, but this is the right thing to do."

David: Also, people figured out some optimizations. People did figure out some of the library side stuff. Some people figured out better ways to do it. But you're right, the hardware got a lot better. Don't you think that if you design for today's hardware, then that maybe is the mistake? It was incredibly optimistic. Peter was an optimist. That's for sure.

Guy: I don't know if he's optimistic. It seemed like just the right thing to do. But I was doing a lot of GPU stuffs, so I could really tell what the intent was.

David: Let's just say that an awful lot of developers weren't. That was not an obvious thing at the time.

Guy: That's true. So it's the most recent thing you work on an Apple, before you left with AirPrint?

David: Yeah.

Guy: I thought it's interesting. I was surprised that you guys even brought printing to iOS for some reason. I don't know why. It seems so obvious now. What was the impetus at the time behind that?

David: Behind bringing printing or behind AirPrint as a printing solution?

Guy: I guess both. Once you decide to do printing, maybe AirPrint falls out naturally from that. Does that makes sense?

David: I would agree with you, but I wouldn't say that was necessarily what everybody thought when we were first starting work on it.

Guy: OK.

David: [laughs] I mean in this point in time, it seems pretty obvious. Man 1 I don't mean to diminish the...

David: No, no, no. I know you don't, Guy. I just think you're right. It's just that some people have to agree. The first thing is, "Why printing"? That is harder to answer. To me, if you want these devices to have rich capabilities, that is one that is pretty much given. There are some things that are missing that should be given that aren't there like create PDF out of printing thing you have on OS X. But being able to print for a lot of people is really...

Guy: A mass market feature.

David: It really is. By the way, I know this is jumping ahead a little bit, but I'll just tell you, for me, if my wife wants to print a photo, I'll say, "Get it on your iPad and print it from there." It's just so darn easy. I've got 4x6 paper loaded in the printer here. She just prints, and she get a really nice...It works that really good.

Guy: I know a lot of people who [inaudible 30:37] now, and anyone in the family wants to print.

David: To me, in part is the failing of OS10 printing, because iPhoto printing is way more complicated than it really needs to be for the common person. Personally, look I am coming from a printing background. I take it for granted that you want printing on a computing platform, which the iPhone and iPad are computing platforms. It's just they are disguised very nicely. When we tackled the problem of how to do printing on the iPad and iPhone, or iOS, basically, the question is on a Mac you don't even see it anymore because of the way drivers are delivered. They are all downloaded now. Historically, we shipped gigabytes of drivers on the OS platform.

Guy: Abnormally so. [laughs] I was so angry at how many gigabytes I had to get for that. It was an option. Right? It was like, "No. Don't install drivers for that thing."

David: Yeah. Sometimes you could choose which manufacturers. There are all kinds of different scenarios. I tried to stay as far away from those things in printing as possible. Having third-party code run, as part of the OS, as opposed to as a third-party app, was something that was not really going to happen on iOS. It just wasn't.

Then you have the problem of how do you support any decent number of printers. Even if you said, "OK. We're going to only support the printers from manufacturers XYZ, the big three, Epson, and Canon, and HP. Even among their printer lines they had tons of different drivers for OS10 just for their printers.

That just wasn't feasible. We on the team thought that the only way to do it was really to say, "OK. We're going to define how printing is going to work from the point-of-view of the printer, not from the point-of-view of the user." We'd had a lot to do with that, too, but AirPrint means two different things. I'll just say a little bit about it.

AirPrint, it's a technology that Apple defined that we licensed. They, now I don't work for Apple anymore, but Apple licenses to printer manufacturers. Basically, you build this technology into your printer, and then you're an AirPrint printer, and anything that can print to an AirPrint printer can print to your printer.

The idea was to have a communication protocol that defined how you are going to talk. It's up over Bon Jour for discovery, and IPP which was called the Internet Printing Protocol, which is basically a control protocol for how you communicate the data to the printer, and commands for what the printer is supposed to do. I don't mean the graphics that the printer is supposed to draw, but I mean you are supposed to print on this size letter paper, or this kind of paper, letter, A4, whatever.

These features you are trying to turn on in the printer, quality modes, and things like that. There is that layer, and then there was the PDL layer where JPEG is one of the graphics formats that you can send to the printer, because clearly when you are printing photos you want to be able to ship off the JPEG, if you can.

PDF is one of the protocols that you can send PDF documents to printers that support it. That's not a requirement for an AirPrint printer, but that's one of the things. There was a Raster Graphics format that Apple defined that everybody had to support.

Guy: Is that a fixed-pixel definition?

David: Yeah. Well, there is a couple of different. It's basically a Raster format with a couple of bit depths that are potentially supported, and a couple of color models that are supported, and compression scheme, and stuff. No. It's pixels. If you are going to do vectors, you're going to do PDL. Basically, we had to get buy-in from Apple Management to say, "Yes. We could build into iOS a printing system for which maybe there aren't very many printers when it first ships, because we're basically defining a new printer language," if you want to call it that.

It was the only real practical way to define a way for iOS to print, and it's turned out to be very successful. There are now a lot of printers from tons of manufacturers, including some you wouldn't expect. Like Dell, for example, ships some AirPrint printers. Almost all of HP's product line now, Canon, Epson, Brother, all these printer manufacturers, now they are doing AirPrint, which is great.

The idea was you buy a printer you don't have to think about whether it has this AirPrint or not. It just does.

Guy: It seems to me that this is the way it should have worked always.

David: There are those of us who feel that way. [laughs]

Guy: Yeah. Fair enough.

David: Well, I agree with you. You know what? We learned a lot.

Guy: Yeah.

David: We learned a lot in 20, 25, 30 years. In some ways, Post Script was some of these things. Post Script was sort of part of that, but it didn't have the control language. Well, I'm calling it a control language, but the things that IPP allows. Any feature support in Post Script was done through the Post Script language. It was connected to the PDL, which has some really negative effects.

Guy: PDL is Printer Document Layer, is that it?

David: Printer Description Language, I guess. No. PDL, I guess, is Printer Description Layer.

Guy: The stuff you are going to print, basically.

David: Well, it's like Post Script is to PDL, PDF can be. It's a PDL for AirPrint.

Guy: Yeah.

David: Yeah. Sorry. You know how it is when you get used to these terms, and you forget.

Guy: No. I knew what it was. I just don't remember what it expands to in anyway. [laughs]

David: Yeah. No. We learned a lot over time, and IPP didn't just show up for AirPrint. It was something that had been developed over a long period of time. Mike Sweet, who is now at Apple, has been at Apple for years now, but he is Chair of the IPP. It's an international standard. He has been formative in the development of it over time. Early days of OS10, we licensed software from Mike whose company, Easy Software, he did the software called CUPS, and we licensed it, and that became the server part of the OS10 printing system.

Guy: Common UNIX Printing Service, yeah.

David: I don't know if it's Service. That sounds good.

Guy: System?

David: I thought it was System, but it could be either one. Mike will yell at me later, now.

Guy: Yeah. Now, you know what? Now, I'm sure it's System. [laughter]

That gets built into OS10.3 or something like that. Does it switch over to it?

David: 10.2. We shipped CUPS, and that's what enable printer sharing, for example. CUPS was an implementation, but the actual language, so to speak, EP, that was the key part. That was the part that every printer vendor that was doing an AirPrint printer now had to build IPP into their printer. It's been a huge win. There is a lot more that Apple can do with AirPrint. That's the printer side of it. The other side it was the iOS, or the Mac side where we had to build client support in. To people on iOS, AirPrint is the printing system on the client side, too. If you look at the APIs, people look at that as AirPrint.

Guy: It's a mixed bag. What it enables is pretty interesting, because you can get feedback from the printer. The printer could tell you what kind of paper is in there, and then the client, being the iOS device, can format specifically for that paper.

David: Yeah. One thing that was a really important part of building a simple-to-use printing system on iOS was there is not a lot of UI, and the idea was to build as much intelligence into the printing system itself so that the user didn't need a lot of UI in order to print. If we know what size paper is in the printer, then we can communicate that to the app, and the app can format for that size paper, and the user doesn't have to choose a size paper. Where there is multiple choices, for example, and this is already in iOS, there is multiple photo papers in your printer, then an app that is printing photos will give you a choice.

You can choose which photo paper you want to print on.

Guy: That's cool.

David: Yeah. It is cool.

Guy: I didn't know that. [laughs]

David: Yeah. It's a relatively new thing. It's part of IPP. It's part of what is in AirPrint. It's something either you have to be able to configure the printer to tell us, or there has to be a sensor in the hardware to know what type paper, and that tends to be a more expensive solution. At least if you can configure your printer to tell it what paper you've put in it, then it can report to the host. Geez, I don't want to have to pick a paper size. Just print on what's in there. [laughs]

There is a lot of that. We tried to make the iOS printing system pretty smart in that regard, and AirPrint is a piece of that trying to be smart.

Guy: Well, it's a second shot at doing what the OS10 printing system. Right?

David: Yeah. Of course, we support AirPrint printers on OS10, too. That's something we have there, too. Ideally, you can plug in your printer and you don't have to download any software at all. It just works. That's the way I run here at home. We run the AirPrint printers in the house.

Guy: Yeah. I do the same. Not that I print that often.

David: Me nether. One thing I just wanted to say is I feel like my career and working on printing systems and stuff, I feel like I just happened to be at the right place at the right time, because my personal opinion is I'd like to phase out printing. I don't want to see a lot of pieces of paper. Adding "save as PDF," I hope that has, already, in OS10 saved millions and millions of trees sending that to somebody instead of printing something and mailing it, or whatever.

Guy: I do that all the time. Safari has that nice feature "save as web receipt." There is a bunch of apps.

David: That's not Safari, by the way.

Guy: It's the printing system.

David: It's the printing system. Safari can do it. That's what you're using, but that's a just a piece of the printing system.

Guy: Yeah. No. I agree. I just meant they have a menu item for it, and I'm sure it's like three lines of code.

David: I'll tell Rich you said that. He'll be glad to hear it was only three lines. That's exactly it. I would like to see that in iOS as well. Not that specific thing, but the ability to get PDF out instead of pieces of paper. I don't know. I felt like in terms of leaving Apple, I am personally hoping that printing becomes less important. It has over time. I don't mean that because I've left Apple. The time has been coming for a long time, and hopefully it can build out more, if necessary, to make it less necessary to print. My wife still prints all kinds of stuff.

Guy: Yeah. It's still a common thing, but it's one of those things that you hope like 15 years from now is not common.

Rene: For generations of people they want to hold it in their hand, or it's not real.

David: Sorry. The first developer conference I went to was in 1987, and what was going on at the time was Mac2 had just come out. The Mac SE had just come out. Steve was long gone. I've pretty much been to every developer's conference since. This is probably going to be the first year I'm not going. [laughs]

Guy: That's good.

David: Yeah. First of all, you guys on the East Coast have a big advantage. [laughs] Did you go last year?

Guy: Yeah. I did. I don't know. I got lucky.

Rene: Likewise.

David: Did you actually have a ticket, Rene?

Rene: I did.

David: You did. I used to go. For my first, I'd say about seven years at Apple, I used to go and I'd spend the week. Well, when it was in San Jose I could come from Santa Cruz, and I'd just drive over. When they moved it to San Francisco, I would go up and I'd spend the week in San Francisco, and I would go like anybody would go. It was plenty busy at the developer's conference, but I could still do that as an employee. Not every employee could do this. I really did try and have a developer focus as much as I could. It was one way to learn about stuff you're not working on. It's hard to find time to learn about all that other stuff when you are doing development in the company.

I loved the developer's conferences. Over time they got so crowded. There was so much stuff. As employees, we pretty much the only part that we got to go to was if you were presenting, or it was your team was giving a talk, and then we had these labs, which I loved the labs. I don't know if you guys tended to go to them?

Rene: Sure.

Guy: Yeah. I've been to a few. There is a lot of value in those labs.

David: I really liked it. People would come and you'd get to talk one-on-one, and they had a problem which usually you could solve pretty quickly for them, which was nice. There are some that are a lot more in depth. There are some you can't solve, but I liked talking with the developers that came. I went to an awful lot of the conferences. Then, I'd say about the past maybe four years or so, it was pretty much you couldn't go. You just couldn't go as an employee.

There is one thing here that I wanted to mention, and by the way, whether you guys want to use it or not, but I just think it was sort of funny. I did listen to your podcast with Grant Paul, which I thought was really interesting. I don't know the guy, but just to hear him talking about the jailbreaks. One of the things that I remember was the early days of debuggers and stuff on the Mac, because in `85 timeframe, or `84, `85, or whatever.

You started with the two-Mac debugger, which basically you had a Mac over here, and you had another Mac over there, and one of the Macs was basically showing all your debug stuff while you are debugging your app, and it was all your debugging machine code, and all of that.

Then this really cool debugger came along called TMON. You ever heard of this?

Guy: No.

David: Yeah. This is a long time ago. The TMON, all of a sudden, what you could do with the two-Mac debugger you could do on a single Mac. It's like you could drop into TMON, and it was like a-I don't want to say Windowing System. They had a funky way of doing Windows-but it was really cool. When I think back on what those things were like, machine code debugging only, no Windows, really. Just Window constructs and stuff, and I just thought, "God. We had it so tough." Yeah. Listen to this. [laughs] Listen to what this guy Grant is talking about with compiling his stuff on an iPhone, and debugging it.

Guy: Yeah. [laughs]

David: Then he's talking about I forget which game console.

Guy: It was Nintendo Wii. He was saying you just break it.

David: Never again. [laughs] You have to buy a new one. Well, he figured out how to fix that. He figured out how to make it so this couldn't happen. You could revert. I hear that and I am like, "Oh, my God." I guess this is always true. It's always there is going to be some low-level, crazy thing you have to do if you want to do some neat thing. I just thought that was just so cool what these guys are doing. It's like you want to say, "Oh, we had it tougher in the old days," and then I'm going, "Well, you know what? These guys they did a lot."

Guy: They got it pretty tough, too. Yeah. Exactly. Remember when Macs used to ship with a debug button?

David: That's what I'm talking about. That's exactly what I'm talking about.

Guy: OK.

David: A programmer switch you would put on the side of your Mac, and you'd hit the switch, and it would drop into the debugger, and you'd look at whatever. [laughs]

Guy: I've had to do that before, but I think I got my first Mac in `95, `96, something like that. I didn't know what it was called. I was just like, "There is a programmer switch," and I thought that was pretty cool. [laughs] Not that I had ever used it for much, but I thought it was cool.

David: Oh, no. You had to install it on the side. You could reboot with it, but it had two buttons. The front one was the reboot, and the back one was to drop in debugger. Yeah.

Guy: Very cool. Crazy, but cool. [laughs]

David: Really early on, when the Mac first came out there was no Internet. There was email. How you got information about stuff, and how you communicated with other developers was-not just developers, the Mac community-you waited for "Mac World Magazine" to come out, the next issue of "Mac World." I remember drooling waiting for that next issue of "Mac World." The ability to communicate with other people who are interested in Macintosh, it was pretty much users groups. I used to go to the Stanford Users Group. Being around Apple, they'd get some pretty good people. I remember Bill Atkinson was the one I was particularly interested in, because he was talking about QuickDraw, talking about Mac Pane.

One thing that was really cool, and that played a huge role in my interest and ability to get booted into this community was a guy named Gus Hernandez, who I found out now works at Google. Gus started a little developer group that was a little subgroup of the Stanford Users Group. If you were interested in development, you could come to that.

He got this parade of superstar people to come and talk. Andy Herzfeld was obviously the big name that you would recognize, but Bruce Horn, who was coauthor of "The Finder," Bill Budge who had been a superstar Apple II guy, Larry Canyon who done the disk driver stuff for the Mac, maybe for the Apple II, Chris Crawford who was a game developer early on. I don't remember the name of the program anymore.

Guy: I don't either.

David: He did a cool game. I just remember that.

Guy: I was such a fan of that guy coming up.

David: Is that right?

Guy: Yeah, I'm stuck on his title. It was one of those guys that I was like, "Man, I want to do what that guy does."

David: These guys came, and you can imagine the developer group wasn't a huge group that came. It's not like the user group where you'd get 100s of people, or 100 or more people. This was a handful of people, 20 people maybe, at the most. Gus managed, I don't know how he did it, he managed to get these superstar people from Apple, or in the community, to come and talk to us. It really was so much fun to sort of touch that and to hear these guys talk. Of course, they were sort of like gods at the time. I knew nothing about any of this stuff. When the Mac first came out, somebody at Stanford first started this mailing list, which was sort of a new thing, at the time.

This was '84. An awful lot of people didn't even have email. I had email because I was at Stanford. If you were at a university, you probably did.

Guy: It was still a UUCP style, right?

David: Yeah. Exactly. I was at SLAC so we had a thing called BitNet that somehow connected us to the rest of everybody. You had to know what network people were on. It was really pretty weird. But, somebody started a mailing list at Stanford. Basically, people would send in their information and it would get compiled into a big digest and it would get sent out. It was called the InfoMac Digest. I met a lot of people through that. At one point, I was moderator for that. That just meant you just took mail messages that came in and you used emacs to paste them together and send them. I'm not kidding. That's how I learned emacs. You pasted it together into the digest, and you mailed it out to this mailing list of I don't know how many hundreds of people that wanted to get it every day.

I met a ton of people through that, including some people who later on I ended up working with at Apple or other companies. Like Darren Adler, who I know Don Melton was talking a lot about. Darren, super brilliant guy, I worked with him at General Magic. I didn't work with him at Apple, per say, before he and I were both at Apple at the same time. I met a lot of people through that.

We used to organize these things called Netter's Dinner's. When Macworld came around, which was a big, giant thing at the time, we'd all try and get together to have dinner, so that all these people who you didn't know, but you met finally at some physical location. We went out to Hunan restaurant, a big group of people and stuff.

That was the connection to the community. It's so different now and I love it now. It's so much more connected. What we did was so primitive compared to it. It was really formative, made a difference in my life.

Guy English: There's still that huge bonus of actually getting to meet people and...

David: Totally. No that's why [inaudible 54:53]

Guy: Do this kind of thing. Like chatting and...

David: Absolutely.

Guy: Shooting the breeze.

David: That's why I said at the beginning. When we first sort of started Skype doesn't work man. When it does, look what it lets you do. Rene, you're in New York right now?

Rene: Yes.

David: Guy, you're in Montreal?

Guy: Yes.

Rene: He is getting much better bagels than I am right now.

David: What?

Guy: Don't, you're going to start a fight.

Rene: Montreal's know for its...

David: They have bagels in Montreal?

Guy: Yeah. Exactly.

David: That can't be?

Guy: You came down on the right side of that fight.

David: Wait, better bagels in Montreal? I can't believe that.

Guy: I will send you some sir.

David: Are you serious?

Guy: Yes. Montreal bagels are awesome. There's places in New York that have people drive up here to buy bagels and bring them in the morning.

David: I'm not editing this part out either. [laughter]

Guy: It's all bagels. All the time. This is it. This is actually how we're going to lead into the show. It's bagel time.

David: OK. That's fine with me. I'm really impressed. I did not know that. Many people came back from Singleton Conference and said wonderful, wonderful, things about Montreal. I've never been to Montreal. But I heard that and I'm like, "Wow." This must be an amazing place. But when you add bagels in, now you're talking.

Guy: Well we'll have to find things to get you out here.

David: That wouldn't be very hard to do. The bagels wouldn't even be necessary. [laughter]

I went to college on the East Coast, and I had to go to New York some. Those were the gold standard bagels. I'd lived in Dallas as a teenager. In college years I went home to Dallas during the summer. I worked at a place that was like a chain that was coming out of New York called the "Bagel Nosh".

They made pretty good bagels. They made water bagels. I thought, "OK. This is as good as you're going to get outside of New York City. When you come out here to California, forget it. Don't bother. If you have bothered, I'm sorry. If you haven't, don't."

[laughter]

Guy: We'll take care of you on the bagel side. [laughter]

Joking aside, there are New York bagels, there are Montreal bagels, and then there's just everything else that doesn't count.

Rene: Yeah, there are Montreal bagels, and then there are New York bagels, and then there's everything else.

David Gelphman, former graphics and imaging engineer at Apple, talks to Guy and Rene about writing the book on Core Graphics, developing AirPrint, and discovers Montreal has bagels (Part 2 of 2).

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Show notes

• David Gelphman's blog
• Programming with Quartz: 2D and PDF Graphics in Mac OS X (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics)

Guests

• David Gelphman

Hosts

• Guy English of Kickingbear
• Rene Ritchie of iMore.com

Feedback

Yell at us via the Twitter accounts above (or the same names on ADN). Loudly.

If you own a printer, Foldify will make it fun again. If you don't own a printer, Foldify will make you seriously consider rushing out to get one. The reason for that is Foldify's ability to project itself from the iPad, where the app runs, to the real world, where the app's results live. The idea is remarkable simply -- draw one pre-defined templates, then print them out, fold them up, and enjoy real, touchable, arrangeable models of what you made. The execution is even more remarkable, because the developers managed to keep the app as simple as the idea, and that's no easy feat.

Launch Foldify and you'll see some examples of what can be done with it: Superfolderman, yellow car, tree, forlorn mushroom, bleeding box, house, red bus. Tap the + button and you get the blank versions of all those forms: box on a stand, cube, tall box, mailbox, pyramid, pyramid on a stand, car, D&D die, bus, and house. Tap the shape you want, and you're on your way to art.

The work view is where Foldify is really clever. You see a spin-able 3D render of the model on the left, and the open paper form on the right. As you work on the paper form, the 3D model updates in real time. It takes a moment to figure out which plane on the paper form corresponds to which plane on the model, but once you do figure it out, it provides excellent spatial placement for what you're drawing.

Tools are bread-and-butter. Thin pencil, thick paintbrush, stamps (eyes, noses, mouths, mustaches, hands, arms, eyeglasses, car parts, house parts, fruit, leaves, and patterns -- and more you can buy via in-app-purchase), eraser, color picker, under, redo, and restart (from blank). You apply the tools with one finger, move and rotate the canvas with two fingers. It's no more or less intuitive than any other, similar art app on iOS, though there are some collisions at times when the same two fingers are required to rotate stamps.

Once you're happy with your creation, you can exit the work view, which saves it, you can print it and get to folding, or you can share it to the Camera Roll, Twitter, Facebook, over email, or with the Foldify universe.

If you share it with the Foldify community, you'll be able to see it -- and like it -- in the online gallery, alongside everyone else's shared creations.

As mentioned previously, you can get additional extras via in-app purchase. Currently there's a Christmas Time pack with 26 elements available for "free" (as in you get it if you share the app via Facebook or Twitter, a coupling of which I'm not overly fond). There's also accessories, clothes, horror, and stickers. Each pack is $0.99. I bought them all, and I hope -- and believe there will be -- more over time. (Not everyone is artistic, so letting people use the app, coloring-book and Mr. Potato Head style, regardless of artistic talent, is really smart and greatly increases accessibility.)

Overall, Foldify is a brilliant idea turned into a brilliant app, and the developers seem intent on improving it at a rapid pace. Whether you simply want to make your own, hand-crafted set of Avengers, Justice Leaguers, Star Trek bridge crews, or Star Wars characters to set on a shelf, or you want to enjoy an incredibly fun activity with your children, Foldify is the way to do it.

Grab it now on the App Store and save 50% during their launch-time sale.

• $2.99 - Download now

If you've ever watched the Transformers and wished you had one -- not a manual toy but an actual transforming model -- then stop reading and watch the video above. Done freaking out over the rolling out? Good. Here are the details, courtesy of Christina Bonnington at Wired:

Having an Autobot mini prowling iMore HQ, reporting suspicious activity back to my iPad mini, would pretty much be a geek dream come true. So, I guess it's time to learn autocad, robotic and automotive engineering, 3D printing, and alien AI programming. Back in a bit...

Source: Wired

If you yearn for the days when you had a Polaroid instant camera and loved the square white bordered instant prints that it produced then this Kickstarter project is for you. The Impossible Instant Lab looks to transform your iPhone’s digital photos into real instant photos that you can touch, feel and share with your friends.

The Impossible Instant Lab is very simple to use too, you just fire up the companion app, select an image you would like to print, place the iPhone face down into the cradle and open the shutter on the Instant lab. The signal will tell you when it has received the image and then it ejects it where you can watch it develop right in your hand; just like the good old days!

If you like the look of this nostalgic Kickstarter project and would like a piece of the action then you had better be quick; it has received a phenomenal amount of interest already. The first two pledge options are sold out so you are looking at a minimum pledge of $229 to secure one of the first off the production line. The Impossible Instant Lab set out to achieve a funding total of $250,000; it has already smashed through that goal and currently sits at $414,000 and still has 22 days to go. It is safe to say that there is a lot of demand for instant iPhone printing.

What do you think of the Impossible Instant Lab?

Source: Kickstarter

Whether you just happen to be surfing the web, reading a news article, or viewing a document on your new iPad and you want to print out, or you're doing actual work, for work, and need a hard copy, AirPrint makes is easy to print just about anything right from your iPad -- as long as your printer is compatible.

How to see if your printer is AirPrint compatible

To be able to print from your iPad you'll need a Wi-Fi enabled printer that supports AirPrint. To see if your wireless printer is supported, you can view the following list on Apple's website -

• List of AirPrint enabled printers

Apple adds new printers to this list regularly. If your printer shows it's compatible but your iPad doesn't find it, make sure your printer is running the newest firmware version. In order to upgrade your printer, you'll need to check your manufacturer's specifications. Most of the time it's as easy as checking for an update straight from settings and letting it update.

How to print from your iPad using AirPrint

Once you've got your printer configured to support AirPrint, you can print straight from your iPad.

1. Navigate to the document you'd like to print.

2. From the navigation menu, choose the additional options menu which looks like a box with an arrow coming out of it. It may be located in different positions based on what app you're trying to print from.
3. Choose Print.

4. Now you'll need to choose the printer you'd like to print to.

5. Adjust the number of copies you'd like to print and then tap Print.

That's all there is to it. Your content should print directly to the printer with no computer required.

Troubleshooting AirPrint issues

If you run into issues printing something from your iPad, try performing the following steps and see if they resolve your problems -

1. Make sure your printer is updated to the latest firmware and supports AirPrint (you can refer to the list above provided by Apple or ask your manufacturer).
2. Check to ensure that your printer is connected to the same network as your iPad is. Your iPad won't recognize your printer if it isn't wirelessly connected and on the same network.
3. Make sure you are selecting the correct printer name. If you have more than one printer in your home by the same manufacturer it can be hard to tell which is which so check the exact model numbers.

Once you've got your new iPad and printer paired up you'll be able to wirelessly print documents without ever touching a computer. It's a great feature to utilize when you aren't in a position to hop on a computer or don't want to boot one up just to print something. I actually find myself printing from my iPad and iPhone more than I do my actual computer these days. What have your experiences been with AirPrint?

As part of the steady march towards iOS 4.2, Apple has released Mac OS X 10.6.5. Beta versions of this OS were said by developers to be necessary to enable iOS 4.2 iPhone and iPad AirPrint support for networked printers. Now, however, there have been rumors networked AirPrint support has been postponed or cancelled.

We'll try it out with the iOS 4.2 GM but we likely won't know for sure until the release version of iOS 4.2 hits, hopefully soon.

If you've updated to 10.6.5 and have iOS 4.2 GM, let us know if it works for you!

iOS 4.2 is the grand unification update, the software that brings iPhone, iPod touch, and for the first time, iPad all onto the same version number and at the same time. Yes, it's the one firmware to rule them all.

Announced during Apple's 2010 special music event, for iPad's that have been running iOS 3.2 since launch back in April, the change is nothing short of a revelation. Multitasking, folders, and unified inbox from iOS 4.0 join Game Center and TV show rentals from iOS 4.1, and add in AirPlay video sharing and AirPrint wireless printing fresh to iOS 4.2.

Huge.

And we're going to take you through it, after the break!

(Note, if you're interested in iPhone or iPod touch, we've got a complete iOS 4.2 for iPhone walkthrough as well!)

What hasn't changed

Almost everything has changed this time. Likely because there's no weather or clock apps to ignore. Still, there doesn't seem to be anything new in Contacts yet, but we'll keep our eyes peeled.

Huge update, we told you.

Hardware changes

No, that's not a typo. As you're read below, Apple has added a software orientation lock to iOS 4.2 for iPad, similar to how it works on iPhone. That means the previous, hardware-based orientation lock is no longer needed, so they've made that a mute switch like on iPhone. Yes, they really changed a hardware button. Yes, it will make iPhone owners less confused but it will mess with existing iPad owners.

Either way, be advised.

System-wide enhancements

Many of the system-wide enhancements that came with iOS 4.2 for iPhone were already present in IOS 3.2 for iPad -- spellcheck, text replacement, etc. And unfortunately, there's still no sign of VoiceControl, which both iPhone and iPod touch have. There is, however...

AirPlay is an evolution of Apple's AirTunes system that used to let you stream music between iTunes on Windows or Mac and Apple TV or Airport Express connected speakers. AirPlay takes that to the next level, letting you stream video and pictures as well as music from iPad (or iPhone or iPod touch) and the new 2010 Apple TV. Built-in apps like iPod, Video, and YouTube can stream, but unfortunately it looks like all other apps, including Apple's own Safari and all App Store apps are currently limited to audio-only. Whether this is intentional or Apple simply ran out of time and didn't finish making public APIs for video is unknown but hopefully this will be expanded upon in a future update.

You can tell AirPlay is an option when its icon appears to the right of the volume slider. It looks like a TV-style box with a triangle being inserted up into it. (Yeah, seriously). AirPlay compatible apps, when AirPlay compatible devices are present, will show the AirPlay icon as a button. Tap it and you get a list of devices you can stream to. Tap one and your video will switch from iPhone to TV. And since it's called AirPlay and not AirView, here's hoping Apple also expands the functionality in the future to project game video onto the big TV screen, leaving iPhone and iPod touch as a full on multitouch game controller. Hey, we can dream…

AirPrint is Apple's wireless printing service. By the time it ships, it should be able to send pages to almost any printer on the same Wi-Fi network, or to certain printers directly (HP ePrint have already been announced). Needless to say, this answers one huge piece of previously missing functionality. (The one it doesn't answer, and still isn't answered, is easier file transfer and sync).

Yes, you can finally -- finally -- control volume, skip tracks, and do pretty much anything your stereo Bluetooth headset allows. Unfortunately, at least in my tests, volume changes on the headset don't show up on the iPhone's volume slider -- but they do work in both iTunes Store streaming and iPod apps.

Home Screen

SpringBoard, the app that runs the home screen and overall interface in iOS, finally gets the iOS 4 crown jewels of multitasking and folders, but there are a few small changes to go through first.

The little northeast pointing arrow that indicates a location-based service is running, be it Wi-Fi mapping or aGPS, now shows up in the status bar along the top, just like iOS 4 on iPhone.

The red bar that shows background VoIP is here, long and thin though it may be. (And yes, tapping it does indeed take you right back to your VoIP/Skype call).

There's more control inside Settings for Spotlight, but nothing in the search interface itself that we can find yet. If Apple were to create a true universal search, including for settings, app content, etc. like webOS 2.0 or BlackBerry OS 6, that would terrific.

While Apple's built-in apps (like iPod, Mail, etc.) have had background multitasking since iOS 1.0 for iPhone and iOS 3.2 for iPad, with iOS 4.2 it finally comes to 3rd party App Store apps.

As to how it works, instead of a traditional "leave full apps running in the background" approach, Apple instead chose to implement a more restricted but, they felt, better performing and power friendly solution involving 7 specific background API (application programming interfaces.)

Local notifications

In addition to the existing push notification service from Apple's servers, which provide sound, badges, and alert popups for everything from IM to VoIP calls, to game challenges, iOS 4.2 adds local notifications so something like an alarm-clock app could register an alert that would sit in the iPhone in the background until the proper time, then activate. That takes the online server out of the equation which is good for tasks that don't need additional information from the cloud, and so don't have to activate the radios.

Task completion

There's another API for task completion so that, for example, if you're uploading a picture to Flickr and leave the app, it can register a thread to keep uploading the picture in the background while you do something else. That means the entire app doesn't have to keep running, freeing up memory and lightening battery load, and even the thread will terminate when the upload is done.

Fast app switching and saved state

Fast app switching deals with the perceptive speed that multitasking offers. With iOS 3.2 if you left an App Store app it would shut down completely. If you went back -- regardless if it was a second or a week or later -- it would usually restart not from where you left off but from the beginning. A few developers tried to add persistence on their own, saving your place when you came back as best as previous OS versions allowed, but most didn't -- especially games. Also, if you closed one app and went to another, you could theoretically be stuck swiping back or forth between 11 home screen pages. And with a 9.5-inch screen, that could be a lot of swiping!

Saved state is now built into iOS 4.2 for iPad. If you switch out, Apps have their currents state recorded to memory and if/when you go back, the app checks the memory save and resumes from that state.

To enable fast app switching, Apple's created a new UI metaphor. Now, when you double tap the home button, the screen turns translucent and slides up, allowing you to peek at the apps running "in the background". (Technically frozen with state saved and threads registered with the background API).

Apps in the fast switcher UI are sorted in order of last usage. That means, if you're moving between a set of commonly used apps, they're most likely right next to each other and not screens and screens away. These two elements combine together to make launching apps perceptively much faster, even though the apps don't have to be running in the background consuming resources just for that convenience.

Positionally the fast app switcher replaces the space traditionally reserved for the Dock, so while it's a tad confusing the concept of apps at the bottom of the screen being more permanent and easily accessible remains. Behaviorally, while they look like a secret Dock, they function like the Home Screen itself in that you can swipe from right to left to scroll through a several 4-icon sets of multitasking apps.

Given iPad has only 256MB of RAM, we assume Apple will discretely kill off the least-used app in the stack when things get tight or a certain amount of time passes. That means, yes, sometimes you will come back to that game and have it start over rather than resuming, but resources on mobile devices -- they be constrained.

(Here's also hoping iPad 2 gets 512MB of RAM like iPhone 4 did.)

iOS 4.2 helps users visualize what's going on when switching apps by introducing a new, carousel-like animation. It's a bit different than the carousel style used in iPhone and iPod touch, more like panels swinging around, but it works well. The new animation occurs when you switch between two apps either via the new, double-click-Home to trigger to launch the multitasking UI, or when one app calls another app (i.e. when you're in Contacts and you tap to send a contact an SMS).

Launching or leaving an app retains the same, zoom-based effect as always.

Interlude: Task Killing

At the iOS 4 event, Steve Jobs likened task managers (in the multitasking, not to-do sense) to styluses -- if you need them there's something wrong. Initially this created confusion in iOS 4 when it was noted, if you hold your finger down on multitasking apps, they'd jiggle and bring up a delete icon that, if tapped, removed them. So um, yeah.

It appears like there's a couple things going on. First, with built-in Apple apps, like Mail, if you "delete" it from the fast app switcher, the service will re-spawn immediately so you will still receive Mail (it doesn't kill the background thread that checks, sounds/vibrates, and updates the badge). However, the respawn will sometimes fix issues of mail not loading properly, for example.

For App Store apps, if you "delete" them it flushes their saved state and forces them to reset and reload when next you launch them, i.e. they won't resume from the previously saved state and their threads seem to be restarted.

And yes, you can still hold down the Sleep/Wake button until the red Shut Down slider appears, then hold down the Home button until you return to the home screen, and that will flush the RAM and give you a general reset.

Widgets

Just like to the left of the main home screen is a special Spotlight screen, to the left of the fast app switcher is a special widget dock containing a software version of the iPad's previous hardware orientation lock control.

That's right. The hardware orientation lock button has been reassigned as a mute switch, to match the iPhone, and now orientation lock is software based. Unlike the iPhone, however, you can lock in both portrait and landscape mode.

More over, there are three circular music controls to skip back/rewind, play/pause, or skip ahead/fast forward whatever audio is currently queued up (including streaming music). Whichever app is currently playing the music, be it iPod, iTunes or Safari (streaming podcasts, for example), or an App Store app (like Pandora or Slacker) is shown at the right so you can jump back to it and access further controls.

iPad 4.2 also gets something more than iPhone -- it gets all the widgets in one dock, and it gets a brightness slider thrown in to boot. The extra screen real estate pays off with instant access to crank things down for reading or up for watching movies.

The presentation may not be as visually slick as Palm webOS' Card view (which looks like iPhone Safari's Page view) or Mac OS X Expose mode, but it keeps tens of millions of existing iPad users grounded in the interface they're familiar with and that's what Apple is prioritizing.

Background music, location, and VoIP

Speaking of streaming music, perhaps most famously, Apple is allowing apps to register three specific types of threads for persistent backgrounding (they can just keep running until you close them). Again, this isn't the whole app running, just one thread from the app, so the idea is it won't slow down performance, use up memory, or drain battery to the same degree. These API are for streaming music, location, and VoIP (voice over IP).

This means you can listen to Pandora, Slacker, etc. while surfing the web. Navigon, TeleNav,TomTom, etc. can keep using the GPS and alert you to directions while you're on the phone, and to further save resources, non-critical location apps like FourSquare, Gowalla, Loopt, etc. can be alerted when you change cell towers. Fring, Skype, Line2, etc. can answer calls and receive messages when you're not in the app, making them more equal telephony citizens.

What's still missing are background API for timeline updates, so that IM, Twitter, RSS, etc. could update like Mail does and have new messages ready and waiting when you return to the app. Also, there's no API to let internet sessions like SSH, RDP/VNC remain active when you exit an app making it more onerous for network administrators and others to manage remote machines. Hopefully these can be added in future revisions.

There are umpteen hundreds of thousands of apps in the App Store, tens of thousands specifically for iPad, and more and more every day. With iOS 3.2 on iPad we had 11 pages for 180 apps viewable, but you could install many more and use Spotlight as a way of finding and launching them. And Organizing them efficiently? Forget about it.

Enter Folders. A Folder is simply a grouped icon that holds up to 20 other icons inside it. (And for those keeping count at home, the new math means a whopping 3600 apps can be kept available at once. Super hudder).

The way it works is you tap a Folder icon and once again the Home Screen fades and splits open, this time below the Folder. Inside the split are all the apps contained in the group.

To create a Folder, you begin by tapping and holding an icon to put it in jiggly mode, just like you did before to delete or move it. Then, drag it over and drop it on top of another icon to create a Folder. (This works better when icons aren't at the right edge of the screen, as the "get out of the way" behavior sometimes supersedes the Folder behavior, causing the icon to wrap to the next line before you can drop on top of it.) Once created, iOS reads the apps' category data and tries to name the folder for you, but you can easily edit it and change it to anything you want.

As you add apps to a folder, tiny representations of the apps icon appear inside the folder icon in a 3x3 grid. Since iOS 4.2 on iPad supports more app than the iPhone version, 20 instead o 12, as you add more than 9 apps, the grid of tiny icons scrolls up to show the new apps being added. Since 20 isn't divisible by 3, when you hit 19 or 20 that row contains only 2 icons. Once you leave jiggly mode, the folder icon scrolls back down to show only the first 9 icons again. So, if you need visual reminded for certain apps being in certain folders, make sure you add them first so they'll be visible.

To remove apps from a Folder, put them in jiggly mode inside the Folder and drag them out (or just delete them if you don't want the app anymore at all). You can also move them around within the Folder to customize their order.

Folders can be put in jiggly mode and moved as well, but not deleted (they can only be deleted by removing all the apps from within them, and which point they self-destruct for you). You can even move them to the Dock, which means you could have 120 apps readily available at any time for quick launching.

You can also manage them from iTunes 10's app interface if a mouse and keyboard helps you speed up the process. (Oh, the irony.)

And while you still can't delete Apple's built-in apps, you can take the ones you're not using and hide them away inside a folder so they waste as little Home Screen space as possible.

Again, not as visually exciting perhaps as Mac OS X's Stacks, but it keeps current iPhone users in a familiar interface while adding much-needed functionality.

Calendar

Calendar app appears to be functionally identical to iOS 3.2 but for the color scheme. The shades are all pastel now, just like iPhone on iOS 4.1. Full on Miami Vice light purples and greens and peaches and tones only Prismacolor has names for. No idea what this change was about.

Notes

Notes finally -- finally lets you change fonts. That's right, if Marker Felt was never your thing, you can now jump into Settings and switch it to Chalkboard (essentially Marker Felt with a shave and a haircut), and Helvetica, used by the rest of the interface.

Curiously -- and frustratingly -- there doesn't seem to be AirPrint support for Notes.

Maps

A minor tweak, but the current location/current direction button changes from the previous crosshairs to a north-east pointer to match the new location services icon used in the title bar, much like the iPhone's did under iOS 4.0.

Video

Video, the app that unlike the iPhone but like the iPod touch houses all movie, TV, and video podcasts on iPad, enjoys AirPlay integration so all of the preceding should be able to easily stream to the 2010 Apple TV (and perhaps 3rd party AirPlay devices one day, if any offer video support).

YouTube

YouTube only gets a minor update this time, which is kind of disappointing given how great YouTube has been making YouTube.com work for iOS devices. In any event, if you've ever wished you could give a YouTube video the old thumbs up or thumbs down right on your iPad, the you're in luck.

And, of course, the AirPlay is right there, giving us hope any HTML 5 video will be instantly transportable to the TV.

iTunes Store

iTunes store gets AirPlay too in case you want to stream a video podcast and shoot it over to your 2010 Apple TV. Speaking of streaming, thanks to iOS 4.2 background audio, streaming on iPad is now as rock solid as it's been on iPhone since 4.0.

Most of the time you can scrub and it re-buffers and keeps playing flawlessly. You can stop it and come back hours or even days later -- even after using the iTunes app to search for other things or the iPod app to play different audio -- and it still knows where you left off and starts playing again instantly without missing a beat. I almost never download podcasts anymore. That's how good the streaming is now (especially if you're mobile with an iPad 3G).

Ping isn't exclusive to iOS 4.1 -- it's already available to iOS 4.0.x users -- but Apple is touting it as a new feature and it's being launched at roughly the same time, so it makes some amount of sense to fold it in here for easy reference.

A social music network, Ping debuted with iTunes 10 but only became accessible on iPad with iTunes 10.1 and iOS 4.2. You get to it via the double talk bubbles tab, bottom middle. If you haven't yet synced your iPad with iTunes 10.1, you'll get a Ping splash screen telling you to do so. Why it can't just ask for your login like Twitter or Facebook and even Apple's own Game Center is beyond me. Cut the tether already.

Once you've signed on, the Ping tab will come up with the Activities view. Activities show what's going on with the people you've followed -- status, pictures, and videos from recording artists like Lady GaGa, and comments, likes, and shared music from friends. It gives you the ability to like or comment on any of those things and, of course, instant access to preview and purchase the music being liked or commented on in iTunes. That also means there's currently no way to share or discuss music that's not in iTunes, specifically in your local country's iTunes store, which can be frustration for Beatles fans in the US, and fans of far, far more artists internationally.

Actions are fairly simple. To like or add a comment to an activity, tap the appropriate button. To preview or purchase a song that was posted, tap anywhere on the song widget, from album art to title. To be taken to the song's album, double tap on the title.

The People tab gives you a list of people you follow and people who follow you, as well as a featured button for a list of recording artists.

Tapping on a person gives you profile page with recent activity and an easy follow/stop following toggle. You can also switch to an info view that contains a short bio and buttons to see the person follows and who follows them. Similar to Twitter, people can either let anyone follow them or decide to approve followers on a person to person basis.

The My Profile view, as the name suggests, shows you your own recent activity and, at the bottom, has a button for My Info that shows you your own profile. You can't (yet?) edit this info on iOS, however, and will need to go back to iTunes 10 on Mac/Windows for that.

I'm not sure if it's the blank loading screen, but iTunes Store has never felt like the snappiest app on iOS and including Ping inside it likewise makes it feel less snappy than Twitter or Facebook. It also doesn't seem to save state of, or cache, the tabs - perhaps because they're web pages being re-loaded each time - which makes the experience of moving between apps seem sluggish. There's also no refresh feature, you need to switch between tabs to check for new data, and sit through more reload screens...

At least Apple finally added social integration, albeit by way of Twitter and not Facebook as they'd originally tried. Most of that seems to live inside the desktop iTunes, where you can link your Twitter account, find people you follow on Twitter, and friend them on Ping as well. What you like on Ping then gets tweeted to your Twitter account. That could be to your liking or incredibly not.

The other addition is TV show rentals. They're only available in the US and from ABC (whose parent company, Disney, counts Steve Jobs as its biggest share holder), and FOX (whose owner, Rupert Murdoch, sees mobile devices as a way to save old media), and cost $0.99 per episode. You have 30 days to start watching and 48hrs. to finish once you start.

Ping hasn't show up in iOS 4.2, but since the UI is web-based Apple can update it at any time, so it's almost certainly will be coming to the iPad with this release. We'll update when it shows up. It will be interesting to see what Apples does to balance the rather awkward iTunes Windows/Mac UI with the fairly standard iOS on iPhone UI.

App Store - iAds

App Store, like iTunes Store is mostly just a thin app container around constantly updated web content, but Apple has snuck something new in this time, if not for users than at least for developers. And yeah, we're talking about iAds...

Okay, so iAd really shouldn't be considered a feature, at least not for users, but it will be a feature of iOS 4.2 for developers, and it will go in apps, so we're mentioning it here.

iAd will provide developers with an easy-as-Xcode way to place advertising in their apps, both paid and free. Apple is setting a high bar for their ads, however. No simple Google-style text, annoying punch-the-monkey, or jarring transition out of the app and into the browser, they claim to want great looking, highly interactive, emotionally compelling content that will connect with rather than alienate users. Served every 3 minutes...

Settings

Settings is a boring app that often contains a great number of terrific surprises when it comes to Apple iOS updates. iOS 4.2 for iPad is no exception.

iPad gets all the wallpapers that iPhone got with iOS 4, some of them re-rendered to look even sharper on the big 9.7-inch screen.

Since Apple is, post Google-breakup, awfully serious about user privacy, Location Services get a new Settings tab that lets you turn them off completely, but also turn them off in each app separately if you like.

iOS 4.2 brings alphanumeric passcodes to iPad by default (no more configuration file required). Turn it on and you can have a nice, strong, even gnarly pseudorandom string... if you can remember it.

And yes, you get the Vader-black keyboard standard if you flip that switch.

To the list of things you can lock down and lock out, iOS 4.2 adds Deleting Apps, no doubt to the cheers of parents with young children everywhere. You can also prevent changes to location services (so your kids can't stop you tracking them, unless they're hax0rs) and email accounts.

If you don't want them playing multiplayer Game Center games, you can stamp that out as well. You can even turn off friend requests.

iOS 4 spell check causing more problems for you than it's fixing? No problem, you can now turn it off.

Gmail is dead, long live Google Mail.

Inside MobileMe, Google Mail, or other IMAP accounts, you can choose whether or not to enable sync. Again, there's no support for Exchange ActiveSync accounts yet (including Gmail via GoogleSync).

Because mail now supports threaded email messages, Settings now gives you the option to turn that feature on or off.

Notes now has its own Settings tab because, as mentioned previously, you can now change the font in Notes, and here's where you do it.

You can also choose the default account for Notes sync if you have more than one IMAP mail account set up.

Game Center

Game Center, Apple's social gaming network went live with iOS 4.1 for iPhone and iPod touch and comes to the iPad with iOS 4.2. As of this writing, Apple has a Game Center section set up in the App Store to help you find games that support it. To start off, you can create or login to an account, update your status, and add friends.

And yes, on iPad Game Center takes advantage of the full screen. You get a double column-view instead of single like on iPhone, and that means your lists (like friends) will on the left and the detail view (like stats) will be on the right.

Also, the sign in/welcome screen currently shows a number of app icons "dealt" card-like across Game Center's game table style UI. Tapping them does indeed take you to the App Store to get the game.

You can also see a list of your games that support Game Center. Tapping on one gives you general info and the ability to hit Play and go straight to the game. Tapping on Leaderboards lets you see top scores for Today, This Week, and All Time.

Achievements shows everything you can earn for playing the game.

Safari

iOS 4.2 finally gives iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad the ability to find text on a Safari web page. This is similar to Windows or Mac, where you just hit CTL-F or CMD-F, type your text, and off you go. On iPad Safari you use the regular old search field (still confusingly labeled Google by default) and start typing the text you want to find.

Where previously you only got suggested search terms, now you get an additional section at the bottom to find the word on the page. Tap it and the first match on the page is highlighted in yellow and a set of buttons slide up on the bottom for "Next" and "Done", as well as a counter for how many matches of the word there are on the page, and which one is currently highlighted (e.g., 7/16). Hit next until you find the one you want, hit done when you're finished. If you want to change the find term, the search box is repositioned alongside the controls to make it convenient.

No more tedious manual scanning, no more javascript bookmarklet workaround. Just happy surfing.

The previous + icon, for adding bookmarks and Web Clips is gone, replaced by the Action button found in other apps. Hitting the action button gives you all the same options as before, but now also includes AirPrint.

AirPlay will show up inline for videos where compatible but is currently limited to audio only.

Behind the scenes, Apple has added support for the accelerometer and gyroscope and generally improved HTML 5 support. (That means the potential for more, better web apps in the future.)

Mail

iOS 4.2 for iPad Mail gets a unified inbox just like iPhone has had since iOS 4.0. For those with multiple email accounts whose previous iPad experience involved tapping into and out of those boxes many, many times a day this is a hugely welcome addition.

Unlike iPhone, the split column view of iPad lets you see your inbox choices on the left in landscape mode and in popover in portrait so it can be even faster to move around. The list includes all Inboxes, a specific account's inbox (which is considered fast inbox switching), or into the complete folder and sub-folder system of a given account (how Mail has worked in iOS 3.2).

Once inside, All Inboxes is visually indistinguishable from an account-specific inbox, it simply contains all of their messages.

What is distinguishable are the carets (technically greater-than symbols) to the right of certain messages that indicate a message is part of a thread. A number, typically 2 or 3, accompanies the caret to indicate how many replies are in the thread.

Tapping on a message that's part of a thread gives a second list of all messages in the thread. Tapping on one of them shows you the message in the main column.

A thread view contains a small vertical bar at the top with the subject of the thread and time of the most recent reply. A button to the top left of the message contains the name of the inbox you came from so you can back out again, leave the thread completely, and see all your messages.

So yes, the tap, tap, tap of inbox navigation persists, albeit shifted from moving into and out of inboxes to moving into and out of threaded messages.

Great news for heavy ActiveSync users, iOS 4 supports multiple accounts. So, for example, you can now have your work Exchange server and home Google account both set up to push through ActiveSync (which is what Google Sync users behind the scenes) at the same time.

Also for Gmail users, the Delete button has now been properly renamed as Archive (since Google really doesn't want you deleting anything if they can possibly help it), and the trashcan replaced with a storage box icon.

Lastly, in iOS 3.2, when you wanted to abandon an email, you would hit Cancel and get options to Save (store the email in Drafts), Don't Save (trash the email), and Cancel (go back to writing the email). The naming of these options was likely too confusing so in iOS 4.x they've been replaced with a big red Delete Draft button (to trash the email) and Save Draft.

Photos

Photos get a bump in the functionality department, primarily through the Action button getting AirPrint. Just tap, choose a compatible printer, and your photos go wirelessly from iPad digital to hardcopy ink or laser.

Photos also get AirPlay and you can swipe through them and watch them change on Apple TV. Unfortunately AirPlay for video isn't supported.

iPod

iPod on iOS 3.2 for iPad was fairly well rounded already, so the bump up to 4.2 seems fairly minor at this point. You get AirPlay, so you can send music to Air Port express speakers, or video to the 2010 Apple TV.

Availability

iOS 4.2 is a free update currently in Gold Master (GM) for final testing, and unless anything major comes up, it should be released this week.

Conclusion

iOS 4.2 on iPad is a revelation. It's the way iPad is meant to be. That's not to say it's perfect or has every feature on every geek's wish list -- it certainly doesn't -- but it has enough new functionality to make iPad much more valuable.

Like with iOS 4 on iPhone, multitasking and folders extend the existing UI in a way that gives power users what they need, but keeps casual users either grounded in familiar metaphor, and feature-phone types blissfully unaware it's even there.

AirPrint addresses an important bit of functionality for home and business alike, and AirPlay has the potential to turn the TV video scene upside down.

Sure, non-obtrusive notifications, and glanceable, lock-screen widgets -- and hey, AirEasyFileTransfer -- would be grand, but iOS 5 beta is only 4 months or so away...

For now, we'll just thank Apple's iOS team again -- this is one hell of an update. If you notice anything we've missed, send us an email or drop a note in the comments and we'll add them to the next update.

iOS 4.2 for iPhone is small update to iOS 4 and iOS 4.1 that adds marquee new features like AirVideo and AirPlay, fixes some bugs, but most importantly brings the iOS platform into grand unification, with iPhone, iPod touch, and -- finally -- iPad all on the same version number.

(Note, if you're interested in iPad, check out our complete iOS 4.2 for iPad walkthrough as well!)

If you don't have time (yet) to read this through this whole article and are eager to get the basics down now, there's a video up top to tell you everything you need to know in just over 5 minutes.

We're showing it off on an iPhone 4 and an iPod touch 4. Functionality is almost identical, just the telephony (i.e. text tones) don't work on iPod touch 4, of course.

What hasn't changed

We'll be covering what's new and improved below, so for what hasn't changed be sure to check out our massive iOS 4 walkthrough and iOS 4.1 update walkthrough because we won't be repeating all that here.

System-wide changes

AirPrint is Apple's wireless printing service. By the time it ships, it should be able to send pages to almost any printer on the same Wi-Fi network, or to certain printers directly (HP ePrint have already been announced). Needless to say, this answers one huge piece of previously missing functionality. (The one it doesn't answer, and still isn't answered, is easier file transfer and sync).

AirPlay is an evolution of Apple's AirTunes system that used to let you stream music between iTunes on Windows or Mac and Apple TV or Airport Express connected speakers. AirPlay takes that to the next level, letting you stream video and pictures as well as music from iPad (or iPhone or iPod touch) and the new 2010 Apple TV. Built-in apps like iPod, Video, and YouTube can stream, but unfortunately it looks like all other apps, including Apple's own Safari and all App Store apps are currently limited to audio-only. Whether this is intentional or Apple simply ran out of time and didn't finish making public APIs for video is unknown but hopefully this will be expanded upon in a future update.

You can tell AirPlay is an option when its icon appears to the right of the volume slider. It looks like a TV-style box with a triangle being inserted up into it. (Yeah, seriously). AirPlay compatible apps, when AirPlay compatible devices are present, will show the AirPlay icon as a button. Tap it and you get a list of devices you can stream to. Tap one and your video will switch from iPhone to TV. And since it's called AirPlay and not AirView, here's hoping Apple expands the functionality in the future to project game video onto the big TV screen, leaving iPhone and iPod touch as a full on multitouch game controller. Hey, we can dream...

Home Screen

SpringBoard, the app that runs the home screen and overall interface in iOS, gets its multitasking dock UI tweaked. Now, after you double press the home button to bring up the fast app switcher, you can swipe left to get to the audio controls and orientation lock as before, but you can also swipe left again to get to a new volume slider and AirPlay control.

Since iPhone has hardware volume controls, it may seem a little redundant, but perhaps it will independently control AirPlay video in the future.

Messages

Messages gets an extra button at the very top of the threaded view that, right in the middle between call and contact info -- FaceTime.

When you're exchanging SMS or MMS, just tap it to launch into a FaceTime video call (if you're both on an iPhone 4 or iPod touch 4, and on Wi-Fi, of course...)

Photos

Photos gets AirPrint now so you can quickly snap a shot and beam it to a nearby printer. Ultra-modern technology meets age-old media memories. Just tap the action button and, not surprisingly, print will be a new option at the bottom.

Print is also now an option when you multi-select.

What is surprising, however, is that there's no AirPlay button in the Photo app when it's playing movies. Since quickly recording a home movie and beaming it to our TV is one of the features we love most, that's a bit of an annoyance. Hopefully Apple will add that in an update.

YouTube

YouTube gets AirPlay, of course, so you can beam YouTube videos to Apple TV... which has a built-in YouTube app already. However, the convenience of being able to play an already-found video on the big screen rather than having to look for it again is certainly appreciated.

Also, gone are the old star ratings and in their place are the cheesy thumbs up and thumbs down. From a scale of 5 to a scale of 2? It's simpler and more YouTube, if missing the subtle iTunes-like gradations of the past.

Notes

Notes finally -- finally! -- lets you change fonts. That's right, if Marker Felt was never your thing, you can now jump into Settings and switch it to Chalkboard (essentially Marker Felt with a shave and a haircut), and Helvetica, used by the rest of the interface. Here's a mockup we created to show all three fonts together for comparison's sake.

Curiously, there doesn't seem to be an AirPrint option in Notes. It would certainly be handy.

Voice Memo

iOS 4.2 for iPhone brings with it a new Voice Memo icon and with it the most drastic redesign of a built-in iOS app icon to date. Sure, Calculator got a facelift recently, but it retained that pseudo-realistic look and feel Apple used for the other "utility" apps, like Compass and Camera. Voice Memo goes from faux microphone to strictly white icon, similar now to Phone or iPod, but without the diagonal pin stripe. If it was in the dock it might fit, but grouped in the default Utility folder, it kind of sticks out.

iTunes Store

iTunes store gets AirPlay too in case you want to stream a video podcast and shoot it over to your 2010 Apple TV. What, you wanted something as big as iOS 4.1's Ping?

Settings

As always, Settings is the least glamorous built-in app in the lineup that just so happens to get a bunch of tweaks and changes to support new features added to the system and flashier apps.

You can now prevent the physical hardware volume buttons from affecting ringers and alerts, if you so choose.

The good news for iPhone users is, Apple has finally increased the number of text tones. The bad news is, most don't seem well suited for use as text tones, and while you can now set personalized tones for different contacts, you still can't buy or create custom text tones.

New tones include Anticipate, Bloom, Calypso, Choo Choo, Descent, Fanfare, Ladder, Minuet, News Flash, Noir, Sherwood Forest, Spell, Suspense, Telegraph, Tiptoes, Typewriters, and Update. You can hear samples from each in the video at the very top of this walkthrough.

You can now prevent people (i.e. your young children) from deleting apps. It's amazing how fast a 4 year old can yank everything from the dock and obliterate every app on your home screen. No longer. Parents of the world rejoice. You can also prevent the little tykes from changing Location Services (e.g. GPS) and email accounts.

You can also now prevent your kids from accepting Game Center friend requests, thus ensuring their online play remain strictly anti-social and (potentially more) secure.

Interestingly, when setting up a MobileMe account, you're now presented with the opportunity to enter either your MobileMe or Apple ID credentials. We'll have to wait and see what, if anything, this means.

Notes now has its own Settings tab because, as mentioned previously, you can now change the font in Notes, and here's where you do it.

Phone + Contacts

In both Phone and in the Contacts apps proper, you can now choose to set a distinct text tone (SMS/MMS) for each contact. So if you want mom to remain good old Tri-Tone but dad to be Choo Choo, have at it!

Just tap edit, scroll down to Text Tone, and then choose from the same list shown in Settings, above.

Safari

iOS 4.2 finally gives iPhone and iPod touch the ability to find text on a Safari web page. This is similar to Windows or Mac, where you just hit CTL-F or CMD-F, type your text, and off you go. On iPhone Safari you use the regular old search field (still confusingly labeled Google by default) and start typing the text you want to find.

Where previously you only got suggested search terms, now you get an additional section at the bottom to find the word on the page. Tap it and the first match on the page is highlighted in yellow and a set of buttons slide up on the bottom for "Next" and "Done", as well as a counter for how many matches of the word there are on the page, and which one is currently highlighted (e.g., 7/16). Hit next until you find the one you want, hit done when you're finished. If you want to change the find term, the search box is repositioned alongside the controls to make it convenient.

No more tedious manual scanning, no more javascript bookmarklet workaround. Just happy surfing.

The previous + icon, for adding bookmarks and Web Clips is gone, replaced by the Action button found in other apps. Hitting the action button gives you all the same options as before, but now also includes AirPrint.

AirPlay will show up when you're playing videos in Safari but currently only supports audio.

Behind the scenes, Apple has added support for the accelerometer and gyroscope and generally improved HTML 5 support. (That means the potential for more, better web apps in the future.)

With this support, Augmented Reality is now possible as well, right in Safari.

iPod (Music/Video)

As we're sure you guessed by now, the major addition to the iPod app for iPhone (and Music and Video apps for iPod touch) is airplay. So, you can send any music to Airport express speakers, or video to the Apple TV (2010).

iOS 4.2 pricing and compatibility

iOS 4.2 is a free update for iPhone users and for iPod touch users.

Compatibility should be the same as with iOS 4.

• iPhone 4, iPod touch 4 (2010): All features
• iPhone 3GS and iPod touch G3 (2009): No features requiring iPhone 4 or iPod touch 4-type hardware (i.e. front facing camera)
• iPhone 3G and iPod touch G2 (2008): No features that require higher processor or RAM
• iPhone 2G and iPod touch G1 (2007): not compatible/no update

We'll update as soon as we find an official list from Apple.

Conclusion

While iOS 4.2 for iPhone and iPod touch is nowhere near as significant an update as iOS 4.2 for iPad, that's only because iPhone and iPod touch have enjoyed iOS 4 features since June. From small but long missing features like Find in Safari, to annoyances like Marker Felt in Notes, to the start of individual Text Tones in Messages, Apple is continuing the steady improvement of iOS.

It's still not perfect, it still suffers from the age-old gripes of poor notification handling among other things, there's still no good, SIRI-infused, OS-wide VoiceControl system, etc. etc. but those are not the stuff of minor updates. iOS 5 will no doubt be previewed in 4 months or so and then we'll see to the bigger issues.

For now iOS 4.2 not only does what it set out to -- unify the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the same release -- but with welcome additions like AirPrint and AirVideo -- if it really takes off -- it could be the beginnings of something transformative.

And as always, If you noticed we missed anything, drop us a note in the comments or send us an email and we'll update as needed.

AirPrint is Apple’s wireless printing service. By the time it ships with iOS 4.2, it should be able to send pages from your iPad or iPhone to almost any printer on the same Wi-Fi network, or to certain printers directly (HP ePrint have already been announced). Needless to say, this answers one huge piece of previously missing functionality. (The one it doesn’t answer, and still isn’t answered, is easier file transfer and sync).

Currently, in order to test AirPrint, you need iOS 4.2 beta, Mac OS X 10.6.5 beta, and a network attached printer. Oliver Haslam from the I-Blog had all three so he put together a video, after the break.

For more, check out our complete iOS 4.2 for iPad walkthrough.