Today is RISC OS show-eve, which means tomorrow is RISC OS show-day – and the show in question is RISC OS North – and as ever, exhibitors have been beavering away to bring get updates and/or new products ready. In the case of R-Comp, there is always a wide range of goodies, but in particular Andrew Rawnsley has announced some new software:
R-Comp is pleased to announce a new program for RISC OS to enable printing to many modern inkjet printers direct from RISC OS. The new software is called MailPrint and takes advantage of the “print-by-email” facilities offered by many Wi-Fi-connected printers, especially from the likes of Epson and Brother, although some Canon and HP printers also offer(ed) this. For those that don‘t do email-based printing, a cloud-print mode allows jobs to be sent to Cloud services like DropBox or OneDrive, and printed from there.
MailPrint streamlines the whole process, so all you need to do is click “Print” in your favourite RISC OS application, and then a few seconds later (depending on internet speed) your printer will burst into life (assuming it is on – yes, we made that mistake a few times during development!).
The software allows printing from wherever you are in the world, making it ideal for use with laptop computers – it supports both RISC OS 5 and RISC OS 4.x on emulators etc (and should work on other systems too). This means you can print out an email (say) whilst you‘re away, and have it waiting on your printer when you get home.
On top of that, it allows direct printing of photos, images and MS Office documents, which can be quite handy. If someone sends you a powerpoint file (ppt or pptx), for example, you can print out a copy even though RISC OS can‘t handle Powerpoint files directly. The photo print mode allows for high quality photo prints on appropriate paper stocks.
CloudPrint mode is offered as an alternative – it allows printing to a Canon that doesn‘t have an email mode. It does so by allowing you to send your print job to a Cloud drive, and then print from Cloud. The mode is a bit less exciting that it may sound – you‘ll need to provide RISC OS access to the Cloud service. We did this by doing a standard Windows share on our PC DropBox, and using LanMan98. Paolo Zaino‘s ShareFSserver seems like an ideal cross-platform solution to this. Once created, CloudPrint mode uses the printer‘s web service to print the document.
CloudPrint mode also offers an interesting ”extra• capability that one tester has now employed for invoice printing. It can generate sequential print job names in PDF. So, you can simply set the file name and destination in the Choices window, and the counter to whatever value you need, then run off Invoice1001/pdf, Invoice1002/pdf and so on into your Invoices folder. We did this to ensure unique names for CloudPrint jobs in the cloud service folder, but as you can see, it has other uses.
Price & Availability
MailPrint is available now, either at the show or via !Store. The !Store version includes the Hermes mail transfer software and costs £35. It is discounted to £25 at the show, and includes a printed manual and CD. There may be a cheaper version on !Store without Hermes, but the show version is the most fully featured.