Cloud Printer (formerly, Cloud Print) for Mac OS X
By Somasundaram M (2011)
This free application allows you to send a print job to your Google Cloud Print enabled printer from your Mac. You can even specify most of the print options supported by your Google Cloud Print enabled printer. This tool also lists the jobs that have been printed to this printer so that you could track them.
This program was previously distributed from this website as 'Cloud Print'. Since adding the Mac App Store for distribution, this new name had to adopted. Further, in order to adhere to certain guidelines for distributing through Mac App Store, automatic installation of the application as a 'PDF Service' had to be disabled. Sorry about that. However, please read on to learn how to get that functionality back again. If you install it through the Mac App Store, then you will informed of updates automatically.
Note for the users of the legacy 'Cloud Print' application
To uninstall the legacy 'Cloud Print' application in order to make use of the application distributed through the Mac App Store, please do the following:
- Open Finder and drag the 'Cloud Print' application to Trash
- Open Terminal and execute ' sudo rm "/Library/PDF Services/Cloud Print" '. You should enter your password, if prompted.
Recommended way to use the application
The recommended way to use the program is to create a 'Print Plugin' using 'Automator' with 'Open Finder Items' as the sink action (select 'Cloud Printer' as the application to launch). Save the print plugin with a name of you choice, example "Print to a Google Cloud Printer". Later, when you print from your application choose your custom print plugin (in this example, "Print to a Google Cloud Printer") from the 'PDF' drop down box to automatically launch this application. When "Cloud Printer" launches, you can modify your print options and submit the print job. This is the most versatile way of using this application and as long as you have a viewer for the file format and the viewing application sports a print option, this method should work. Watch the video below for a walk-through of the process.
The file here contains three *.workflow files that should be copied into users's "~/Library/PDF Services" directory which will provide three automator scripts to print using this Cloud Printer program.
Other ways to use the application
Please note that the file formats that can be supported will be limited. At the moment, atleast PDF/TXT/JPEG/PNG files and Microsoft Office Document/Presentation/Spreadsheet files are known to work.
- Launch the 'Cloud Printer' application from Finder and select the image or document to print using the 'Choose File' option.
- From the command shell, launch the 'Cloud Printer' executable with the file that you want to print.
- From the Finder, right-click the file that you want to print and open the file with 'Cloud Printer' application.
Minimum Requirements:
Intel 64-bit Mac OS X >= Snow Leopard (10.6)
1MB of free Hard disk space.
Download:
File: Cloud Printer.pkg
Size: 492KB
This is a freeware and everybody is free to use it - no advertisements and no non-sense - just a print app. This package downloadble from this website is the same executable that is available in Mac App Store; but for those who are not using the App Store. Click here to download the Installer Package from this website.
You can also download the zip file of the app from here if you have issues with the installer and copy the application to /Applications folder.
Users are encouraged to make use of the Mac App Store whenever possible.
Download Cloud Printer 1.5.2 for Mac from Mac App Store
Release Notes:
- Version 1.0, August 17, 2011: Initial release
- Version 1.1, August 19, 2011: Job settings that are numbers like Number Of Copies are supported
- Version 1.2(b2), August 21, 2011: Last Used Printer and printer settings are saved and restored
- Version 1.2(b3), September 1, 2011: Fix for a crash when used with certain printers
- Version 1.5(b1), September 22, 2011: Changes for Mac App Store + minor bug fixes
- Version 1.5.1(b2), October 11, 2011: Context menus in Job History and Print Settings tabs
- Version 1.5.2(b3), December 25, 2011: Better compatiblity with default settings mode for each printer, Displays user modified printer names.