ios5 killed printing by Print and Share

Artur -

One suggestion I have is for you to look more closely at your Save2PDF app. It sounds to me as if - just like me - you were only using this app as a printer prior to the iOS5 'printer surprise.' Thanks to Apples arrogance, I was forced to investigate more closely this little app, and I must say, I was quite surprised with how much capability is packed into this one little app. And, in concert with WePrint, a "free" application for your Mac or PC, you may have more accress to printing than you think.

Disclaimer: My primary application is printing from the INTERNET. If your print requirements are mostly from the INTERNET as well, Save2PDF has their own browser (called Web pages). From within Web pages you can browse the internet and when you find an article you like, you can select to either Print or Save to PDF, by selecting the appropriate icons in the upper right hand corner of their web page screen. When you click on the 'printer icon' it will find the WePrint Server loaded on any local Mac or PC which then will allow you to print to any printer on the Mac or PC's 'network.'

Further, if you select the PDF icon you can make a PDF which will then be stored in their "Files" folder.

From this Files folder you can then 'select' the PDF's that you'd like to email, click on the icon at the bottom that brings up a slection list (with Email, Export, Move, Rename, Open with App, Zip files categories, etc) and select Email.

This takes you to a Email window, with your selected PDF's as "attachments." and access to all of your Contacts just like any other email program.

Hey, is it as easy as it used to be, pre: iOS5? Certainly not. But the little rainbow coming from Apple STEALING OUR ABILITY TO PRINT, is that I wouldn't have been forced to delve deeper into this Save2PDF app to find all these little print/PDF gems that manage to 'get me through the night.'

Good luck!

Look at all the steps you have to take!

Computing should make things easier not more convoluted.

As all the other solution- just work arounds - all the various shells on the iOS just to get the thousands of nonairprint printers to work and to boot, you have to have helper programs on an active pc- not my idea of progress.

Rikic-

Apple 'broke' (stole?) the perfect solution. We mere mortals are left to just make do with the rabble of solutions left to us.

Wish it were not so... But Apple doesn't care, and we're all we got.

Dear Apple,

I know you're going to remove this, but I just wanted you to know that my iPad 2, purchased in March 2011, is currently up for sale because of this boneheaded decision to limit my ability to use an app I legitimately purchased in your app store, along with the printer that cost me an arm & a leg that I have no intention of replacing so soon after it was working perfectly for me with Print n Share on my iPad 2.

I'm an author. I wrote a large portion of my last novel on my iPad 2, and I have taken pleasure in telling people about it when they say "you can't do any real work on an iPad!" I've been pleased with the device and proud to tell people about it.

However, this decision to ignore us, along with some other factors, led me to try out the Kindle Fire. Is it an iPad killer? Nope, but it doesn't need to be. It's open-ended enough that I can do everything I need to on it. Between that and my laptop I no longer see the need to cling to the iPad. I am keeping the Kindle Fire and selling the iPad, and this is because you chose to limit how I use my device and there was no way for me to get around it easily.

So here's my farewell, Apple. Despite having a bunch of apps I purchased from the App Store, and despite spending a lot of time and energy telling people how great the iPad 2 is, I'm out of here. Your arrogance and your desire to force me to use YOUR solution for something that once worked perfectly ("go buy an AirPrint printer" indeed!) was the last straw. I'm moving on. I'm deleting iTunes. I'm selling the iPad. I have all my music on the Amazon Cloud now, and I will be getting all my Apps from Amazon, the Android Marketplace, and other Android sources. I will be getting my movies and TV from Amazon and Netflix. I will be getting my new music from Amazon. I will be spending my hard-earned dollars at Jeff Bezos' place now, and leaving Apple behind.

No, the Kindle Fire isn't the least-walled garden out there, but it's Android, which is a bit more open than iOS. It's smaller, which means I can carry it with me. It's not super-expensive, which means I don't fret as much when it travels with me. And it's not governed by Apple, who seem to think that disabling a paid app and telling their customers to go buy a new printer rather than using the one they've got is a "solution" to an artificially-created, easily reversed problem.

I wish the other iPad owners well. I'm sorry to take your time with this long screed, but Apple has been too arrogant, and enough is enough.

And besides-- iTunes runs like garbage on Windows. You know it, I know it, everybody knows it. I'm kind of glad to be rid of it. It was almost enough to make me consider going back to Mac. . . Almost. But I'm glad I didn't.

Amazon gets to collect a nice wad of cash from the sale of my iPad, and my purchase of a Kindle Fire, and my purchases of music, movies and apps (as well as money from the sales of my book). I know this won't matter much to you, but it WILL matter to me (and Jeff Bezos, I suspect).

Good bye, Apple. It's been fun. I'm not mad; I'm just done.

Sincerely,

K. Owen

@ sashelby

Mea Culpa. As you see, I put my money where my mouth is, and have sold my iPad (or will sell, very soon, depending on when you read this).

But as to your tone, I appreciate you being civil in your response, and I thought I'd at least owe you the courtesy of a return on that civility. I mistook the tone of your post, and perhaps that's the fault of Apple's forum and your own lack of spell-check, but I'm just too used to people on the Internet waging a war against "the other tribe" simply because they can, and perhaps I made a knee-jerk response when I should probably have been more understanding and willing to read your message in a different tone.

Honestly, it seemed to me to be someone who popped in here to tell people how stupid they are for backing the wrong team.

So I apologize if I misunderstood. You seem a fair enough fellow, and so I recant my claim that you're a troll. You're not; You're just frustrated and bad with forum formatting tools. 🙂

Anyway, I'm out of here because I'm sure Apple won't be pleased with my good-bye letter, or my decision to take my business to their competitor, and I'm fairly certain that post will be deleted at some point.

I wouldn't have come back, but the decision to tell Apple why I'm leaving felt right.

Good day to you, and no hard feelings. You spoke well in your defense, and I respect the heck out of that. Good on you, sir.

Scratch that, Apple. I took the Kindle Fire back and got myself a Samsung Galaxy Tab. It cost less than the iPad 2, and does more.

The Fire is nice, but I wanted Bluetooth, so there you go.

Anyway, as I said, it's been nice knowing you. Keep all my apps warm in the iCloud. Maybe I'll get back into iOS some day, but now that I've got an Android phone and an Android tablet and I've found that they're actually a lot more versatile, open-ended, and affordable than the Apple alternative, I think I may just stay here in Android land.

Good luck with the whole "making people buy a new printer just to print from the iPad" thing.

As much as I hate that I can no longer print to PDF, I'm now ABSOLUTELY FED UP with Adobe's latest piece of shiat incarnation PDF document creator. Permit me to rant about how shatty Adobe PDF has become!

I'm trying to fill out a "fillable" pdf that, whenever I try to click on a fillable field, locks up my browser for 30+ seconds before the PDF lets me do what I want to do (yes you d-bags I have the latest Adobe Reader!). Then on top of that, I have to go to a special website to do an "unauthorized" crack of the PDF so that I can actually print it out to a printer!! This whole rights (mis)management and bloatware BS that Adobe has foisted on working PDF documents is absolutely absurd!

I'm absolutely ****** off that I can't print webpages to PDF on my iphone but if the end result is that it puts a stake through the horribly deformed, mutated PDF shatware then so be it. I say ends justify the means. BTW I will NEVER buy any hacky hardware nonsense like Firewire, AirPrint or any stupid non-standard incarnations that Apple choses to defecate out when perfectly good standard interfaces exist. AND yes I am a hypocrite because I WILL buy Apple's hacky software non-standard incarnation of PDF/PS if it means saving paper 😉

PEace!

I was able to create a pdf of a web page using print n share. I just had to open the web page in print n share Web Pages. Then it worked. I have the iOS 5 upgrade, on an iphone 4. But this very frustrating. It would be nice if you could choose the airprinters, and add Print N Share.

Great idea for at least a less cumbersome work- around, but still something requiring an app purchase.

I still can't get past that Apple disabled a perfectly functioning process - how much of a cut are they getting from printer sales? You would think that their own products are getting enough of the market share.

Too bad no one out there has any influence with the Apple bigwigs:)

Keith -

Been ot of pocket for awhile... that darned 'work thing' keeps getting in the way! Can't spend all my time 'trolling' anymore! 🙂

Thanks for your comments. I must admit that I was a bit ammused that you wrote in your 'farwell address'

"Dear Apple,

I know you're going to remove this..."

... as if you still felt in your heart-of-hearts that they were actually reading ANYTHING on this blog/non-Support Community.

Apple doesn't care.

Can you believe that this was the company who, just a couple of years ago, had the TV ads showing how cool they were versus the Windows/PC people. Remember how they had the hip young, technologically advanced people and the Windows/PC person was some dolt who was "completely out of touch with the world, just throwing money and marketing hype out their to 'buy' peoples business?"

Now look at who's "completely out of touch with the world," [At least the world of their customers.]

Good luck with your Samsung device, and your writing career!

Steve

Sad that I can print effortlessly from my Kindle Fire, but, with all the functionality it offers, since the 'free' upgrade to iOS 5.0.1, I can no longer do the same from my iPad2. From what I see here, it seems unlikely that Apple cares about resolving this problem. Too bad. In spite of Apple's superior platform, I see my next tablet as being Android-powered. How sad.

I use to print using AirPrint on my iPad to a cannon printer being shared on my iMac. Ios5 came along and apple disabled AirPrint printing to shared printers on a iMac running lion. There is a free app for the iMac that turns the function back on. It is called AirPrintActivator v2. Works great.

I wish I knew why apple disabled this function.

I wish that I had read all these posts about losing printing capabilities before I upgraded to iOS5. I finally broke down last fall and got an iPad thinking I'd have this genius piece of technology that would take care of the routine things I do on a daily basis. Everything was a breeze, easy to operate, etc. Now I can't print, with an upgrade? Are you kidding? I was printing on an HP photosmart 7510 until yesterday. There have been several options discussed such as Save2PDF etc........any suggestions for which would be best with printing web pages or documents etc. thanks for any advice.

Don't we ALL wish we had read this blog first. There is nothing new in ios5 that I couldn't live without... and there is something that I can't live without -painless, carefree and simple printing - that IS missing! And Apple calls that an UPgrade? What is wrong with this picture?

Fedosa91, practically any INTERNET printing requirements, pdf requirements and/or emailing internet documents requirements can be addressed using Save2PDF. See my prior post from about a month ago for some details and suggested steps.

Any other "document" printing requirements? Apple has shafted you. On purpose. Intentionally. Because they know more that YOU do!

Even worse is that they don't care, as witnessed by their total non-Support of this blog which has had over 17,000 'views'. Can you imagine any other company in the world that can simply ignore 17,000 customer enquiries and surviving? Only Apple, because they made $76 m profit last quarter from their products ALL MANUFACTURED in China or other non-USA locations? Think about all those lost jobs here in the USA next time you by another Apple product.

Sashelby is so right and I won't be happy until Apple fixes this. I am NOT buying a printer as this is a stickup true and simple. Apple gives us the ability to tweet a web page and takes away all print capabilities except AirPrint requiring most of us to landfill perfectly good wireless printers?! Excuse me, what's that about? If I had known they would do this along the way I too would have gone a different direction for smartphone and tablet. Now I have spent tons of money on iTunes for 200+ iphone and ipad apps (including print and impaired PDF apps) to say nothing of hundreds of songs. Apple please fix this as Android/Amazon is looking more and more attractive and it is demonstrating that it is responsive to customers needs and requirements at lower costs. This Apple printing thing is the greediest of all. Repeat Apple I am not buying an Air printer, you should fix this. It is totally unsatisfactory.