Is there a way to send a print request to a printer using wifi or some other means?
Edit:
There must be, because there are some applications which lets you do that. But how do they do it? For example,
- HP iPrint Photo
- Air Photo
- EuroSmartzPrint
and maybe others as well.
There’s no native way to print in Apple’s SDK. Air Photo prints using a helper app installed on a computer, so it sends the request to the desktop app which actually sends the print request. HP’s app can connect to HP printers that it can find on the network, presumably using Bonjour. The difficulty with printing directly is getting the right drivers, fortunately for HP, they make the printers too. EuroSmartz I believe does both previous methods, but they make no claim as to how good the quality will actually be printing directly to the printer, probably because they can’t include vendor supplied drivers.
So, if you want to print your options are:
Update:
With iOS 4.2, Apple is including a new technology called “AirPrint”. Apple is essentially doing both #1, by printing directly to HP printers that support ePrint (my understanding is that this doesn’t use drivers in the traditional sense), and #2 by printing via a Mac with OS X 10.6.5.