When Mac OS X 10.6.5 was released, support for iOS printing using AirPrint was mysteriously absent. It’s not clear whether the omission was due to technical problems or patent challenges, but with the final Mac OS X 10.6.5, you could only print from iOS 4.2 to a short list of HP printers. Until someone put some effort into re-enabling it, that is.

Developers Steven Troughton-Smith and Patrick McCarron found a way to get AirPrint to work on Mac shared printers by restoring three files from earlier developer builds of 10.6.5 that had been removed or changed in the final release. AirPrint appeared to work reasonably well in the beta, and many observers surmised that it was removed at the last minute due to a patent troll who had asserted they had invented the technology. The re-enabling process isn’t too hard – just a few Terminal commands and deleting and re-adding your printer – but the guys at Netputing figured out how to do it without using the Apple files in question, which could have raised legal issues. They’re distributing it as AirPrint Hacktivator, and once you’ve got it installed on your Mac, your iOS device will think the shared printer is one of the supported HP printers that support AirPrint.

For Windows printers, there’s a similar process for enabling AirPrint as a service under Vista, 7 and XP. If you decide to try and follow Jaxov’s recipe, note that you need to run the command prompt as administrator in order to start the service.

Source: TUAW

FaceTime is coming to Macs.

“The number one request we’ve gotten,” said Jobs, “is can we please do FaceTime calling with these devices and the Mac?” With that, Jobs rolled out FaceTime for Macs. Answering a major request of many Mac users, today Steve Jobs demoed a FaceTime application for Mac OS X, a development that will rapidly expand the growth and usage of the video chat functionality made possible by FaceTime.

“We’re really excited by this,” said Jobs, reference the ability of iPhone 4 and iPod touch users now having the ability to video chat with Mac users via FaceTime, a new service available today on apple.com (in a beta). With nineteen million FaceTime users already spread around the world, it isn’t hard to imagine that millions of new FaceTime users will be ushered into the era of video chat by way of today’s revelation.

“I think people are going to like this based on the requests we’ve gotten,” Jobs told the media gathered at Apple’s Cupertino campus.