Printer patents portend driver-free future

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published two patents in the past week that suggest Apple is trying to eliminate the much-loathed printer driver. As first noted by ConceivablyTech, the two patents each describe a way for your Mac to get the necessary driver information from the printer itself or from the cloud, without the need to install any software on the computer itself.

The first patent, aptly titled "Walk-up Printing without Drivers," describes how the printer itself could basically contains the driver and the computer would then read that driver wirelessly, which would enable one to print to it. The second patent, titled "Data Formats to Support Driverless Printing, " describes a method in which a user's print job data would be sent to the cloud in the background after the user clicks "print" on his computer. The cloud then encodes that print job with the proper data format for the desired printer and returns the information to the computer, which then passes it on to the printer. It may sound convoluted, but the cloud method all happens in the background in a matter of seconds.

Getting the right printer driver has been a bane for computer users since the '80s and with the rise of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, getting the correct driver on a mobile device could be even more bothersome. As Apple's patents suggest, storing the printer driver in the printer itself or in the cloud would be a way to ensure virtually any device can print to any printer.

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Source: http://www.conceivablytech.com/8817/products/apple-to-elimin…

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The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published two patents in the past week that suggest Apple is trying to eliminate the much-loathed...

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Ron Bokleman

Who wouldn’t want this as a possible solution? We all know that Microsoft does this today with Windows Update but it won’t solve the issue that drivers still need to be written. For example users can’t upgrade to the latest operating system (Lion, Windows 8) because XXX vendor’s printer driver isn’t available until December of 2012 or worse never because of age/marketshare/desire.

August 17 2011 at 9:39 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

ALM

As a fine art printer I have ditched printing from my mac and now only use my win 7 pc as Apple has completely messed up access to proper printer drivers that give me paper feed and colour management. I had a total nightmare to get my printer set up for Leopard and then again with Snow Leopard so now I just don't bother. mI'm afraid that with my PC it just works. Fancy that!

August 16 2011 at 10:58 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

mi5ofjamesbond

fantastic news for the Secret Services .... so they can snoop even more easily in your musings..... I'll gone buy an old typewriter (IBM Selectric... if possible) and write my letters the classic way

August 16 2011 at 2:37 AM Report abuse Permalink -2 rate up rate down Reply

GordonTerry

The title should read: "Printer patents PORTEND driver-free future".

Portent is a real word, but it is a noun. If you wanted to use portent, you could have said "Printer patents ARE A PORTENT OF a driver-free future".

I think the first sounds better :)

August 15 2011 at 11:40 PM Report abuse Permalink +1 rate up rate down Reply

Doug B

(Grammar nazi)

Portent is a noun. I think you meant Portend (which is a verb.)

August 15 2011 at 10:04 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Oscar Goldman

Every taxpayer should be outraged at the prospect of these patents being issued. This is SOFTWARE. ALGORITHMS. The USPTO itself says you can't patent algorithms.

Tell your representatives to put a STOP TO SOFTWARE AND "BUSINESS METHOD" PATENTS. They are killing American innovation and entrepreneurship.

August 15 2011 at 7:09 PM Report abuse Permalink -1 rate up rate down Reply

City 17

Wish apple would make printers again, they are probably the most annoying thing to get working on computers!

August 15 2011 at 7:07 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

iddartainnahla

Michael Sweet is the primary architect of CUPS. (Not terribly surprising).

August 15 2011 at 7:01 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Michael

I'll start getting excited when I see that a type of open standard has been announced, and the big names are adopting it. Otherwise, as a patent, every printer company would have to license it from Apple at whatever value apple wants.

August 15 2011 at 6:33 PM Report abuse Permalink +1 rate up rate down Reply

Peter Mostoff

This would be fantastic. I was just having a conversation about drivers today and then realized I hand't reinstalled my printer drivers since I did a wipe of my hard drive. I really don't look forward to having to install them.

August 15 2011 at 6:11 PM Report abuse Permalink +1 rate up rate down Reply