Bonjour le Mac

Mrs McSwitchenstein, on her nth Mac (currently a 24" iMac), has the monochrome laser printer; I'm lucky enough to have some super-duper crazy extravagant color photo printer thing. Most of the time this arrangement has worked because on the odd occasion we've required the other's printer for some unusual need we can just email files between us and be done with it. We invoice each other for consumables, reprints are half price, all good.

By contrast, tonight the incredible happened. Mrs McS wanted to print a color Word document but due to a recent change of infrastructure on the Mr McS side of things, ol' Switchy hasn't got himself Microsoft Office-enabled yet so couldn't deliver the goods. I still have no copy of Office so can't print my wife's .DOC files.

Hey, though, we're both on Macs... right? This should be the most straightforward thing ever... right? 

I figured I'd start at System Preferences, then... mmm... perhaps "Print and Fax". I see my printer but it says "Printer Sharing is turned off" and offers a button "Sharing". I click the button, ah-ha turn Printer Sharing "on", and the hardest bit... well the hardest bit was working out what to do next with the dialog box. No "Close" button. No "OK". No "Apply". No "Done". It was almost disbelief that even that extra click had been made unnecessary.

Running to the back of the house to Mrs McS's Mac, then, to the next step of tonight's adventure---and obviously the story concludes with the inevitable automatic discovery of the color printer, a complete automatic installation of the driver software, all the printing options appearing, and seconds later superb color prints coming from the Canon in my office all the way from the back of the house.

I talked to Mrs McSwitchenstein about Bonjour, Apple's service discovery technology based on zeroconf. She was très impressionée.