When I joined Apple as a summer intern in 1990, working in the group responsible for printer testing, I was told numerous times of the print engineering team's motto of "save, then print." It was widely (and correctly) viewed that this was an honest assessment of the quality of the print code in Macintosh System 6, and even more so of the quality of the not-yet-released print code in System 7.
That was fourteen years ago. How times have changed.
Not.
Eric Raymond, a long-time open source and Linux advocate, recently wrote a rant on how unusable Linux GUI design was in some cases. His example? Trying to share a printer.
The time in the last two years that I was most infuriated by OS X's user experience? Also, coincidentally, trying to share a printer.
At work, we use HP printers. I frequently print long documents with 50% reduction, fitting two pages to a piece of paper to save on paper. The print setup dialog that the HP driver supplies has a tab where you can save frequently used settings. Except that for me, I instead get a helpful balloon help icon that, when clicked, explains that I don't have sufficient privileges to save settings on my computer. Never mind that I'm an administrator user on all of my PCs.
Earlier this week, a print job of mine failed because the printer reported that it was out of paper in Tray #6. I opened tray #6. It had at least three reams of paper in it. I decided that I didn't actually need to print anything anyway.
Earlier this year, Meredith and I wasted about two hours trying to print something at Kinkos's on 11x17 color paper. We never got that to work -- it refused to print on the entire page.
Today, my boss was trying to print a web page, and it kept cutting off the right quarter-inch or so. He kept trying to figure out how to make it print correctly, then said, "aha! I'll set it to print at 50% reduction, and that way it will fit." I told him I'd bet him a dollar that it printed the same cropped image, but at 50% size. Sure enough, I was right. He never did get it to print correctly.
It's amazing that anything ever gets printed from computers. How is it, in 2004, that printing is still such a disaster across multiple OS platforms and multiple printer manufacturers?
Posted by Mike at April 8, 2004 10:08 PM