Yeah! Just what I was thinking of today. When I get my iPad this will be important.

As soon as the new Ubuntu comes out I'm dual booting my HP computer because I'm tired of Vista. Having print support means I won't need to turn on my desktop computer, send myself an e-mail and then use Vista to print things. I'm sure Ubuntu will have all the drivers I'll need for printing, but at first I might not have the right one. I'll be able to print things immediately. I'll be getting my iPad sometime in June so the new OS might be out by then.

I'm not a developer (or even a power user), so please forgive me if this is a stupid question.

Is it possible that Apple will be treating the printer driver as a second app? Perhaps one that detects the printer, loads the driver then prints the document.

If so, perhaps they need to wait for iPhone OS 4 so that other apps will be able to take advantage of it.

I'm particularly excited about iAd myself. Think about this: a running ad bar service is that is on the top or bottom of the iDevice (lord knows that there's plenty of space on the iPad), constantly letting you know about other apps that are similar to ones you've bought previously. That's pretty cool.

You could take it further and have the entire background have 3-D ads, kind of like the city in Blade Runner or MInority Report. It would be like having the future RIGHT IN YOUR HANDS.

And then I suppose you could take it even further by looking at that giant app database, or your 3G cellphone data tower, or whatever, and start putting in regular click ads into the mix that are targeted specifically to you based on your demographics. No more having stupid mortgage ads constantly pop up on web pages that don't interest me! Just like Minority Report, again.

The future is a wonderful place.

I was wondering what that was all about - Apple hasn't had much love for Bonjour of late, but just last week they pushed out the update.

My understanding is that the iPad will only work with Apple's Bluetooth Keyboard... (don't have my own iPad yet - but my 3G is on order)... a nice enhancement would be support for ANY bluetooth keyboard.

IMHO - more and more "full sized computer" features will be slowly added over time until, eventually, you have a simple full-featured device my 65 year old mom can finally use.

It's inconceivable to offer a word app like Pages, on a device like the iPad, and not offer support for printing. To paraphrase another forum user, it's a basic business requirement to be able to print when connected to a network; also pretty basic to be able to print from within a business-related application like Safari, Mail or Pages.

Not only is this is a major omission for the iPad, but the problem with third party apps is that they're all a cheap substitute for the main app (i.e. close the business app, open and view the document in the printing app and then send it to print).

As for Apple directing users to send their documents via email, you lose all formatting, text wrap, etc. when this is done. http://discussions.apple.com/thread....7133&tstart=15

HP has a nice solution for printing photos and such to their printers. I wouldn't have been surprised to see something like that if multi-tasking was not a part of 4. One of the nice things about 4.x is Apple has the opportunity to move its CUPS printing model to the iPhone along with other goodies like a printer monitor.

Printing support will take some support from app developers but it should not be huge for most apps. I would expect that drivers will have to be added through your host computer (although possible to directly download from iTunes like the app store it would open a security hole that could be used for malicious payloads). The security issues are far from nil when opening up printing along with battery usage.