[leticeberry]

Is there any reason they didn't create an app that allows you to print from your playbook?

[OttawaGabe]

At least you can get it to work. I can't get past the BlackBerry ID log in - my PC just brings up half of the blackberry.com website with a message saying my log-in has expired and when I re-enter it it just sits there doing nothing.

+1

There's a thread on this on the Blackberry support forum also, no solutions yet.

[Peritaxis]

Wow, haters gonna hate.

Print To Go is to send documents to your PlayBook over the air instead of through a USB cable or wifi-sharing or emailing. Imagine you have to meet a client at 12PM, and you had to do your mockups and invoices last minute at the computer. You can simply send it via PrintToGo and have it all on there without having to fumble USB cables or wait for it to attach to an email to send.

And I was JUST using it today for the first time. So, I'm the layout designer for the school newsletter. 12 pages. PrintToGo to my PlayBook.

Beautifully renders on my PB to present to other designers and editors for comments. Without having to carry my beast of a laptop.

I'm sorry Print To Go didn't fulfill your expectations, OP. But it definitely surpassed my expectations. Good job, RIM.

[Sith_Apprentice]

If that is true, and you meant a user that is in the field (and not connected to the local wifi network) then that is great! I always thought that the prints to go option will only pop up in the printer dialog and connect with the PlayBook when the PlayBook was connected to the same network as the printer. Guess I was wrong!


Update: it only works for me if my PB is connected to the network that the PC belongs to. If it is connected to another network the PC just prints to my printer and skips the dialog option that allows the prints to go option to be chosen.

So far it is only local. I have a feeling it wont stay that way. And in any case you can, as long as all Playbooks are on the same WIFI, send to multiple now.

[Toodeurep]

Wow, haters gonna hate.

Print To Go is to send documents to your PlayBook over the air instead of through a USB cable or wifi-sharing or emailing. Imagine you have to meet a client at 12PM, and you had to do your mockups and invoices last minute at the computer. You can simply send it via PrintToGo and have it all on there without having to fumble USB cables or wait for it to attach to an email to send.

And I was JUST using it today for the first time. So, I'm the layout designer for the school newsletter. 12 pages. PrintToGo to my PlayBook.

Beautifully renders on my PB to present to other designers and editors for comments. Without having to carry my beast of a laptop.

I'm sorry Print To Go didn't fulfill your expectations, OP. But it definitely surpassed my expectations. Good job, RIM.

+1

We just used it real world here and it was beautiful. We make shop floor documents for machining and the assembly of furniture and .pdf is the only format that works on all devices. I just sent a print to go to our QC Manager out by the cnc machine group and it was perfect. It MAY be limited to file types and it MAY be limited to being on the same network but it will still work great for us.

Had I not seen this post I wouldn't have known I could do that! I'd like to thank the OP but it might be taken the wrong way.

[Yemson]

When I first heard about print to go, I thought it sounded like a great idea: Get all your on-the-go documents consolidated onto your playbook in a sleek, integrated document management tool. Most importantly, I saw it as an alternative to loading a bunch of mixed doc files, spreadsheets and - especially - PDF files by hand, the latter of which would have required that god-awful Adobe reader app to view.

However, now that I've finally got it working (P2G apparently doesn't like NAS - go figure), I'm shocked at how hollow and underwhelming the results are. Basically, P2G takes your printed output and simply converts it to - drum roll please - a PDF! Then it sticks the "printed" file onto the PlayBook and adds an index entry so that the P2G software knows something new has arrived. Tap to open and you're right back to the Adobe Reader I was hoping to escape. Unreal!

Bottom Line: The P2G client on the PlayBook seems to be nothing more than a cleverly animated file explorer, only without any actually useful functionality like full-text indexing or searching of document contents. Basically, it's a bunch of pretty fluff that does nothing that couldn't be accomplished easier via wifi sharing and a little manual file copying.

Frankly, I'm flabbergasted that RIM bothered to even demo P2G at CES. They must really have been reaching for things to show in an effort to justify the 10 month gap between the PlayBook launch and the release of OS 2.0.

What a let-down...

RCK

The reason of your total disappointment is in the first phrase of your post. You wanted all of those fatures, but never in the whole world did RIM tell you that they actually would deliver that. End Result: Your Post.

[Abrante]

So far it is only local. I have a feeling it wont stay that way. And in any case you can, as long as all Playbooks are on the same WIFI, send to multiple now.

Yup. I am happy with how it is now though

[Abrante]

I went to BB.com to load the --Print to Go -- and it will not download.Just get a blank screen.Any ideas?

I sent myself a link that lead to the PC download directly from the P2G app on the PlayBook to my e-mail address and downloaded it from there. Have you tried that yet?

[baldo]

They should rename this piece of crap software to Send To Playbook. Printing refers to printers and paper with words on it typed from your device. Oh and I could never get it to install on my win7 pc. Just hangs at the install. Time to move on. One of Rims biggest blunders.

[Unsure2]

OP is called a "hater" because he/she finds an app less than impressive? Give me a break. OP also has a point. A solution that uses the Adobe reader is less than optimal. Unfortunately, any full-page reader is not going to be that impressive on the 7" Playbook. It goes with the territory. This is one time a 10" tablet would be vastly superior.

[Bluemoonjules]

It installs on mine, it just won't transfer over, and I want it to work!

[Bluemoonjules]

OttawaGabe - If you find anything out, would you post it please, I hate it when things won't work!!!

[bitek]

When I first heard about print to go, I thought it sounded like a great idea: Get all your on-the-go documents consolidated onto your playbook in a sleek, integrated document management tool. Most importantly, I saw it as an alternative to loading a bunch of mixed doc files, spreadsheets and - especially - PDF files by hand, the latter of which would have required that god-awful Adobe reader app to view.

However, now that I've finally got it working (P2G apparently doesn't like NAS - go figure), I'm shocked at how hollow and underwhelming the results are. Basically, P2G takes your printed output and simply converts it to - drum roll please - a PDF! Then it sticks the "printed" file onto the PlayBook and adds an index entry so that the P2G software knows something new has arrived. Tap to open and you're right back to the Adobe Reader I was hoping to escape. Unreal!

Bottom Line: The P2G client on the PlayBook seems to be nothing more than a cleverly animated file explorer, only without any actually useful functionality like full-text indexing or searching of document contents. Basically, it's a bunch of pretty fluff that does nothing that couldn't be accomplished easier via wifi sharing and a little manual file copying.

Frankly, I'm flabbergasted that RIM bothered to even demo P2G at CES. They must really have been reaching for things to show in an effort to justify the 10 month gap between the PlayBook launch and the release of OS 2.0.

What a let-down...

RCK

this is actually awesome feature. I've been doing this with Adobe Acrobat Pro up to now. I am not sure what you expected. It is called Print To Go ? no need to spend $$$ for Adobe Pro upgrade. Plus this is extra easy to get on your playbook, it is sorted, categorized etc.

[Jean-luc_Picard]

My main problem with print to go is that I kind of wish it would format them to fit the PlayBook screen properly. I printed a script with it, but there were fairly large margins on the top and bottom. I guess this makes sense for a lot of document types, but it didn't work too well for the script...

[Superfly_FR]

Just a tip ... you can do this ... remotely ... I mean ... even if your PB is not linked or even on your network ... I've got customers that just went soooo happy with this. The secretary office send them files, nicely sorted, day by day ... no mail, no client, just ... open.

Don't judge the tool, evaluate what can be done with it.

[leticeberry]

They should rename this piece of crap software to Send To Playbook. Printing refers to printers and paper with words on it typed from your device. Oh and I could never get it to install on my win7 pc. Just hangs at the install. Time to move on. One of Rims biggest blunders.

Totally agree! Print shouldn't be in the title.

[OttawaGabe]

If I can get the Timeout issues sorted out, I do look forward to using this quite a bit.

The biggest fix needed for the Playbook right now, is integrated PDF support. Forget the Adobe Reader.

[kc2gog]

This is how I see myself using P2G:

before having P2G:

"Oh crap, I have a meeting to get to. I need to print these presentations and stuff out and wont have time to run over to the network printer and wait."

"oh no, I hit send to printer. Where are my files!!"

..runs back to desk to resend.

..damn the printer is out of paper (or jammed)

after having P2G:

"on time to my meeting. sent the files to my playbook and there they are"



was actually hoping this would allow me to print from my playbook to a network printer, but this is still a useful app to have.

[BerryClever]

I think it would have been nice for them to have included a Mac version. Hopefully soon...

[semicoln]

I like the idea of Print To Go except for the Adobe Reader on PlayBook being complete trash. I was hoping since RIM was pushing this feature it meant that the Adobe Reader would get an overhaul also.

[murnende]

I like the idea of Print To Go except for the Adobe Reader on PlayBook being complete trash. I was hoping since RIM was pushing this feature it meant that the Adobe Reader would get an overhaul also.

I agree with this. The Adobe Reader on the PlayBook has been a sore point from the very start, and this exacerbates the problem. The reader is in desperate need of a major upgrade which would make most of the OP's complaints moot.

I'm actually hoping that the Android player will bring us a fully functional reader, though I'm not holding my breath.

[Morten]

Print to Go makes it easy to get a document onto your playbook (a few clicks ) and that's all it does. That's alot of convenience as opposed to Printing to PDF, entering the PB file system, Copy and pasting onto the PB file system and then opening a file explorer application on the PB, finding the PDF and opening it.

But - IF you handle many documents - you need some way to sort them - and most users today still use either folders - or Tags...

If you one day have 5 meetings with different clients - there are NO easy way today to handle that...

Of course the P2G simplifies the process of creating a PDF file - and copy that file to the unsorted file-storage on the Playbook... but nothing more than that...
Would be easy enough to have added some Tag option - and to have the PDF reader on the PB capable of browsing through those Tags to make some Index....

But - since the PDF reader don't even support normal searching - how can we expect it to do more....

[rkennedy01]

NAT, in my case, refers to Network Address Translation. Right now, P2G won't work if I'm behind more than one layer of NAT - for example, connected to my Dlink wifi router which is in turn connected to my ADSL router (Livebox). If I turn-on the ADSL router's wifi and connect directly (the PB, not the originating PC), P2G finds it and the "print" job goes through successfully. Otherwise, if the PB is connected to my Dlink, P2G just sits there trying to "locate" my PB (which is right next to my PC on the same wifi network).

The reason this is so frustrating is that no other modern communications app seems to have issue with multiple NAS hops. Skype works fine on my PC, as does Hotspot Shield (for VPN back into U.S. territory), Bittorrent and a variety of MMORPG games. Too bad there's so little documentation on P2G as it's probably just a port forwarding issue that I could quickly resolve by giving the PB a static IP and pointing the correct ports its way.

Regardless, my negative assessment of P2G's overall functionality is tied to their choice of document formats. They could have gone with a TIFF image file or any number of other widely supported "print-to-file" doc types. By going with PDF - for which I normally have no objection since it works great under Windows and is integrated with Office - they force us to use the crappy Adobe Reader app. At the very least they should have licensed something else as an alternate viewer or, barring that, integrated PDF viewing with the OS shell.

But tying P2G to one of the most reviled and widely criticized bundled apps on the PlayBook platform? Just plain stupid.

RCK

[BB_Phoenix]

Keep in mind also these documents are encrypted on the PC before going wireless. Then they are stored in a secure part of Playbook. So Corporate secrets can remain secret.

[Morten]

NAS, in my case, refers to Network Address Translation.

You mean NAT - right?