PrinterShare is an awkward app to set up; besides installing it on your Mac, you also have to register an account. After that, on your Mac, you have to specify which printer (or printers) you want to share, whether you want to hide your printer from search results (more on this in a moment), find the remote printer as registered online, select the printer (which is now displayed in two panes of the main Mac application window, and then configure the printer (paper size, “notify me on job completion,” encrypt or not, and so on). In addition, a third window appears when you click on the Mac application’s “incoming” button, and that provides you with a variety of options, including setting default permissions (automatically download and print from approved users, wait for approval, remove, and so forth).
This all makes sense, in a way, because PrinterShare is designed to enable you to print remotely, over the Web, and to allow multiple users to print to the same machine remotely. (For example, employees can all remotely print to a shared printer.) However, there’s no apparent option for simply printing over a local network. And although you can choose to hide your printer from search results (when you are searching for a printer from the iPhone app), it seems that the only way for users to find their own printer is to make it public and find it; then, once that’s done, they can hide it from search results. It’s a confusing process, in part because developer Dynamix Software attempts to protect users from having their printers hijacked by unknown users. It seems, however, that the first option should simply enable you to link your iPhone to your printer by using your user ID, and that “searching” for printers should be a secondary option (because it would probably be unnecessary for most users).
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