The following how-to video will walk you through the basics of printer sharing on the Mac. You’ll learn both how to set up and how to access printers on a network. We will cover the following points: Setting up Printer Sharing Printing to a Shared Printer Adding a Printer via System Preferences You can watch the embedded video below (lower quality) or watch the full quality version here (28MB).

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It’s a little after 6 a.m. Eastern on Friday, March 12 as I write this post. Some two hours from now, the Apple Store will officially take orders for all iPad models, apparently with the ability to specify pickup at a local store. The store is currently down, though it wasn’t the last time I checked about an hour ago. (Trust me, I’m not awake in anticipation of buying an iPad; my work has me on an early-to-bed, early-to-rise schedule.) Like I have with most watershed Apple products of the last decade or more, I’ll order an iPad on the day they become available. For me, this has included, but is probably not limited to, the original iMac, iBook, Airport (gray UFO!) and 5GB clickwheel iPod, and more recently the MacBook Pro, Time Capsule, MacBook Air, and of course, gen 1, 2, and 3 iPhones. Yes, yes, I’m a fanboy, but this is also part of what I do for a living. You know by now that there are six models of the iPad, three with Wi-Fi only, three with Wi-Fi and 3G data access with the same 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB storage capacities in each model. For the sake of discussion, I’ll call them the iPad Wi-Fi and the iPad 3G, even though the 3G model also has Wi-Fi. The iPad Wi-Fi will ship on April 3, with the 3G model due some 1-2 months later. The iPad 3G carries a $130 premium over the iPad Wi-Fi across the lineup to account for costs related to the 3G access, such as a modem and antenna. Other than providing an additional type of Internet access, there don’t appear to be any differences between the iPad Wi-fi and the iPad 3G. I’ll be ordering the top-of-the-line 64GB iPad 3G, the most expensive of the six models, but the one with the most storage capacity and both ways to connect. Why get the most expensive model when a cheaper one could suffice? Here are my key reasons: Storage Capacity: I’m really looking forward to iWork on the iPad, and these files will eat up precious space on the device

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Apple’s much talked about iPad is now available for pre-order. The Wi-Fi version of the iPad will deliver on April 3 or be available for in-store pickup then (if you chose that option). The 3G version still has no official ship date, just an ominous “late April.” I pre-ordered the 16GB Wi-Fi version first thing this morning and let’s just say all the little extras add up fast. The $499 iPad quickly turned in to the $730 iPad between AppleCare and a few accessories. Such is the life of an early adopter, I suppose. So, will you be pre-ordering an iPad today? If so, which one? Related GigaOM Pro Research: • 5 Tips for Developers Targeting the iPad • Web Tablet Survey: Apple’s iPad Hits Right Notes • With The iPad, Apple Takes Google To the Mat

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Mac gaming fans have one less reason to be envious of their PC-using brothers & sisters, now that Telltale Games has made the official announcement that the episodic Sam & Max is coming with a third season entitled The Devil’s Playhouse — and it will be available on the PC, Playstation 3 and yes, even the Mac. Sam’s a six-foot tall canine shamus with a hunger for justice. Max is a hyperkinetic rabbity-thing with an oversized Luger and a taste for violence. Together they’re Sam & Max, freelance police, ridding the streets of bottom-feeding sludge, one dastardly miscreant at a time.   The popular episodic game comes courtesy of publisher Telltale Games, who made the announcement today at GDC. On the heels of the first two popular seasons of Sam & Max comes the good news that the third season, entitled The Devil’s Playhouse , will also be coming to the Mac at long last, and the game is virtually identical across all three platforms. In The Devil’s Playhouse , Sam and Max face a mysterious otherworldly power for controlling matter and space that calls to the strongest and strangest who might wield it — intergalactic warlords and eldritch gods, under-dwellers and scholars of the arcane. It’s Sam’s and Max’s biggest case yet! For those of you new to episodic gaming, Telltale’s niche is having the games play out over a series of interconnected episodes, each one building on the next.

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Apple has a default set of apps that come with every iPhone and iPod touch that you can’t remove from the device, and that provide some basic features that are likely to appeal to a wide swath of users. The iPad will have a default set, too, but it won’t necessarily include all the familiar apps you know and possibly love. According to John Gruber of Daring Fireball , apps that Apple didn’t show off during its iPad unveiling event weren’t just left out because there weren’t many major changes made to them, they actually won’t appear on the platform at all. Or, if they do, they won’t ship with the product and instead will be downloadable after the fact via the App Store. The apps in question are Calculator, Stocks, Weather, Clock and Voice Memos. According to Gruber’s sources, the apps won’t be included not because Apple has deemed them any less useful or appealing to consumers in terms of function, but because Cupertino couldn’t come up with iPad-complementary large-format designs for their user interfaces. Personally, I’m not too upset about the omissions. I barely ever use Calculator and Voice Memos, and I’ve opened Stocks maybe once or twice.

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When it was first unveiled, Apple’s new iTunes LP format -– codenamed “Cocktail” and introduced at a “rock and roll event” in San Francisco -– promised to give consumers a new reason to buy albums instead of individual songs. Offering expanded cover art, lyrics, videos, animation and other digital goodies, iTunes LP was intended to evoke the feeling of spinning an LP record and holding the jacket in your hands. Especially when paired with a tablet computer (then rumored, now real) that would provide a new way to view large-format art, consumers were promised a digital experience that mimicked a physical one. Six months later, however, iTunes LP doesn’t prompt much consumer recognition, and none of the industry sources with whom I spoke said they viewed it as being anywhere close to game-changing from a format perspective. Rather, it’s considered more of a curiosity. Read the full article on GigaOM →

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So here we are, just past the six month mark since Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard was sprung last August 28, and I’m still using OS 10.5 Leopard. I have lots of company. The NetApplications HitsLink Market Share data for February 2010 shows that Leopard is still the most widely-used OS X version, with a 2.21 percent global market share compared to 1.8 percent for Snow Leopard, and good old OS 10.4 Tiger still hanging in at 0.72 percent. Why the Procrastination? So, why the procrastination about upgrading? It’s certainly not the cost holding me back. Snow Leopard is the cheapest Mac OS version upgrade in history, other than complete freebies. Well, for one thing, Leopard works so darned well, and making a major OS upgrade always involves time investment and the hassle of upgrading at least some of your software and utilities (more about that in a moment), and I’ve been short of spare time the last several months. I also tend to be of the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” persuasion, and haven’t been convinced there’s anything Snow Leopard has to offer that’s a genuine must-have for me. Some of the improvements — things like a more responsive Finder rewritten from scratch in Cocoa, faster Time Machine backups, a more powerful version of the Preview application — sound like welcome tweaks, but nothing I find compelling. Stuff like enhanced Microsoft Exchange Server support for Mail, iCal, and Address Book have zero appeal for me since I don’t use that service or any of those features, preferring third-party alternatives. Nor do Snow Leopard’s Safari upgrades fizz me much since I favor other browsers with Safari being my fourth or fifth choice, if that. Bitten Once… There is also the bitten once; twice shy factor.

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Yesterday Apple announced the arrival date of its much-ballyhooed tablet, the iPad. It will have a staggered release throughout April, beginning on the 3rd in the U.S. Once it does arrive, we’ll see what effect it has on the mobile landscape. But right now, Apple has other things to worry about if it wants to keep its newly minted status as a leading mobile device company. The recent threats are at least twofold, one of immediate concern and one potentially dangerous down the road. First, there’s Android’s continued growth in terms of mobile marketshare, compared to Apple’s shrinking slice of the pie. Second, there’s Sony’s potential expansion of its mobile operations into direct competition with the iPhone. Web analytics firm Quantcast released figures this week that show iPhone OS is still the dominant force in terms of mobile web usage, but the trend is working slowly against it. It lost 3.2 percent of its market share last month, while RIM and Google’s Android both gained ground. Over the past quarter, Android has gained a whopping 44 percent, while Apple has lost between five and 10 percent during the same period. That’s only market share percentage, though. Apple is still showing positive growth in terms of mobile users and pageviews, but Google is just doing it that much faster.

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