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Faster printing through Quicksilver or a simple drag and drop



At TUAW HQ we absolutely love Quicksilver, the powerful, incredibly extensible and indispensable productivity tool, as it's capable of speeding up just about any conceivable operation on your Mac. Still, with everything Quicksilver is capable of, I honestly never thought it could be used to help you print documents faster. Sure enough, I have been taught my lesson to never doubt Quicksilver's reach by Mark Fisher, author of this Faster Printing with Quicksilver. In summary, Fisher's how-to walks you through adding your printer to Quicksilver's catalog so it can be used as a target for sending files to print. Combined with the Quicksilver comma trick, you can send multiple files to your printer at once, all from the streamlined efficiency of Quicksilver's search interface.

One downside to Fisher's tip, however, is that it requires a bit of digging around in Quicksilver, not to mention a decent workout training oneself through the app's arguably steep learning curve. If all this tinkering simply isn't your bag, there's a much easier trick I wrote about last year for creating a drag-and-drop desktop printer. This is much easier for virtually anyone to set up for themselves, and as a commenter on that post mentioned, you can drag that desktop printer to the right side of your Dock and delete the Desktop icon altogether, saving precious space for... well, probably all those documents you need to print off to begin with.

Ultimately, either of these tips are a great way print your documents more efficiently, as they remove the need to open each individual app and print the documents manually, one by one.

[via 43 Folders]

At TUAW HQ we absolutely love Quicksilver, the powerful, incredibly extensible and indispensable productivity tool, as it's capable of...
 

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Sadler

Printers - thanks to tuaw I now have a printer in the dock. I dump stuff in there all day long and when I get home hook up the printer and out it all comes! QS is great but not for my printing.

Learning curves - I always understood that the 'curve' is what you have learned, starting steep as you get the basics quickly, levelling off as you get into the difficult details - thus definitely a positive curve. I am obviously wrong as clayton uses BIG LETTERS.

July 24 2007 at 3:45 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
clayton

Sorry. But I just snapped.

Learning curves go DOWN not up. A steep one is GOOD not bad. A learning curve measures the TIME it takes to perform a TASK with REPETITION. For example: The first time you do a task, say, it takes one minute ('cause you spend time fumbling around). The next time takes 50 seconds. The next time takes 40 seconds. Eventually, you can do it (whatever it is) in 30 seconds. So you come DOWN a learning curve as you LEARN to do a task more efficiently. 'nuff said.

Nothing in particular about your article sets it apart from any of 999,999 other incorrect uses of the term "learning curve." You just got lucky being number 1,000,000 (thereby triggering my response -- I just couldn't take it any longer).

Love your tips! Love Quicksilver!

:)

-C

July 23 2007 at 3:08 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Matthias Schonder

Slight OT: I have the same printer... worst crap I ever bought :(
If I print more than two pages every page after the second one is screwed :(

July 23 2007 at 3:02 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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