I’ve just had to reinstall every piece of software and driver for one of my desktops in the office (thanks, Microsoft) due to a Windows 7 upgrade and my general-purpose printer software seems to have taken the opportunity to upgrade itself from a svelt background does-nothing-but-does-everything-you-need piece of software to a sumo-esque-pearly-king-of-an-all-singing-all-dancing-behemoth piece of software. The change that caught my eye is that I am now encouraged via browser plug-in to “save paper and ink” by screen clipping only the parts of screen area that I want to print.
Why would I want to clip and PRINT areas of my screen?
Clip and copy into a doc, turn into a PDF, put into a blog post, add to Evernote, sure. But PRINT?
Surely printers (as we know them) are in their twilight years – just as Adobe have offered the ‘print to PDF’ functionality to be used in mainstream software for years, we should be able to ‘print’ directly to iPhone, laptop, social media location, other network user, etc.?
The Kindle has made inroads into replacing books and paper publications with a device designed to read from… and, as soon as tablets finally find their useful niche in our lives, these will be perfect for transporting documents around in a format where they can actually be read, referred to (without switching between screens and apps) and shown to others. And e-Ink will nail the coffin shut for good?
I’d be very happy to get rid of on of the boxes under a desk, the bills for ink, the bills for paper… and I dare say Carly Fiorina might have a chuckle to herself while patting what’s left of her $20m severance cheque from HP.
Save a tree today – send it via 1s & 0s.