Comment by jacurtis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacurtis | Hacker News Reader

Wow, that's a real shame, because Google Cloud Print was one of those nice little services that did ONE THING amazingly. I loved that I could print stuff from anywhere and it would be sitting on my printer when I got home.

If I am working at a coffee shop, or out of town and bought something that needed to print a receipt, or a confirmation, or anything else. I could print it through Google Cloud Print and it would be ready and printed for me when I got home. It was just a nice convenience that worked every time.

Yes there are alternatives... most printers now have an obfusticated email address that you can send to and it will print from. But this is vendor specific and unreliable and required additional steps (had to save to computer, then open an email client, send an email, etc).

But then again, how can I be surprised? We are talking about Google, the company famous for shutting down projects. I wouldn't be surprised if I wake up tomorrow and they shut down google.com search engine. Right now on Hacker News (just a few spots above this post) is a another site [1], which hosts a countdown for when customers expect to shut down the Google Stadia product... a product that only launched a few days ago.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21596003

Real pity. My school's printer services are terrible. The drivers are a pain to install, and it doesn't even work half the time.

Google Print was a great way to get around these issues, but not anymore. Crazy how out-of-the-blue Google will kill off certain products.

I suppose the workaround is to send all your printables to a Google drive folder, and then have an app on your devices that send those printables to the printer whenever the printer is visible on wifi. Not sure if Android offers sufficient APIs for that though.

Yeah or have that folder synced to a PC running at home, and then have a service running on that machine that prints anything that shows up in that folder.

Probably easy enough to throw this together in python and host it on your choice of cheap, lower power hardware (Raspberry pi, etc).

It'd also be very trivial to script with a Mac using Folder Actions and a 5 line AppleScript.

(I wish Linux had an equivalent to Folder Actions. They’re really nifty.)

The Linux equivalent of Folder Actions would probably either be inotify¹ or inotify-tools².

1:https://linux.die.net/man/7/inotify

2:https://github.com/rvoicilas/inotify-tools/wiki

A much easier to use tool that works using inotify is incron. It's basically like cron except for inotify events. I have a one-liner that OCRs all of my incoming scans, and it's immensely helpful.

What do you use to do the actual ocr?

A python package called OCRmyPDF. It has same defaults and works very well for my use case.

Or just a create an e-mail account which is connected to your small server with IMAP with IDLE.

Create a white list, and if mail is coming from a white-listed mail then print the contents, otherwise discard the mail.

This is how my Deskjet 4515 is working besides GCP. It's a pretty neat solution. It even replies with a result e-mail. I hope that HP won't kill its services too. They've already killed the app side, but remote printing is still intact.

Wait did you just say you liked a google service and they killed it? HA! Welcome to the world.

Google services always find a great niche. The problem is google wants MAJOR hits or bust.

No, they just achieve runaway success on mass scale.

From Google's perspective the flypaper is just bigger; its contents are no less needle-moving.

Contrast with Apple. AirPrint was introduced in 2010 and is still going strong.

AirPrint is a local service; it doesn't do what Cloud Print does. (The name is a clue.)

Cloud Print is also useful as a printing standard where you don’t need drivers.

And to be completely honest, CloudPrint won’t do anything in a year.....

end of an era

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