For some reason, I started reading Alex Payne’s blog.. he’s just some dude from Twitter, but he started writing about how he uses macs but every 6 months or so has an urge to try something else. Sounded oddly familiar…
I had one of those Mac moments yesterday. I’ve had this Canon photo printer for a while, but it had just been collecting dust. I had actually bought some replacement ink for it, and also have a fair amount of HQ photo paper. I decided to try to print some photos out for Q’s mom, so I hooked it up. Now, I had only experienced this printer under Windows, so I was afraid that I would have to go find drivers, or at minimum work through Canon’s silly out-of-place printer UI.
Well, it was one of those things. Just plug it in, and it worked. I guess OS X just ships with drivers for this printer. And they’re not just some generic driver either.. all the things I could care about I could access: borderless mode, paper select, and quality selection. There’s a little bit of custom-ish UI which I think comes from folks at Canon, but it’s still built into the main print dialog, so it looks nice. And more importantly, it’s laid out in a way that doesn’t put duplicate functionality in different places.
Oh and after I plugged it in, next software update asks me if I want to get the new Canon drivers. Nice. I guess Win7 is starting to look more like this, but it’s not quite there yet. Anyways, kudos to Apple, and thanks for a productive morning.
I’m still going to ditch this printer. Printing at home just doesn’t seem worth it. I can try really hard and get decent prints, but my in-laws can print photos at costco from their point and shoot, and they pretty much look just as good. The quality of the printer seems to make such a big difference. Plus, I don’t really want to go through the whole calibration exercise with my printer. I’d rather just send someone my sRGB photos and have them do the right thing.
BTW, why does the WP.com post composition thing crash Chrome every damn time? Come on folks. Test with Chrome. It’s the next big thing.