As some might have read, I discovered that Apple has significantly changed how Lion support AirPrint advertisement of printers.
If you have been using AirPrint Activator you know that with the introduction of OSX 10.6.5 and iTunes 10.1 it was possible to enable a hidden feature that would advertised Mac attached printers as being AirPrint printers.
This no longer work in OSX Lion. As a lot of you have generously donated for AirPrint Activator I just can’t sit idle and let AirPrint support slip with the introduction of Lion.
I therefore decided to completely rewrite how AirPrint Activator work. It willno longer leverage OSX hidden feature as it will implement AirPrint advertisement of shared printers on it’s own.
At the moment my goal is to keep the application simple… essentially a single switch to turn AirPrint on or off… much like AirPrint Activator. Eventually I might start to introduce more advanced features.
Benefits of this new implementation will be:
- No need for “Administrator” password to activate
- Should work on OSX 10.5+ for both PPC and intel
- Will allow for AirPrint sharing of non local printers (like AirPort based printers)
- No need to remove and add printers for AirPrint to work
Downside will be:
- User running AirPrint Activator will need to be logged on
As of last night I have successfully implemented the sharing of Printers on the network. I now need to clean-up the code, build a “System Preference” interface and figure out how to start/stop a user level daemon to “advertise” AirPrint printers.