HN user

jonathan_pwyl

5 karma
Posts0
Comments5
View on HN
No posts found.

Both Aardvark and Nuke Anything are super cool tools, and I stole a lot of ideas from them while creating PrintWhatYouLike. But PrintWhatYouLike also adds a whole bunch of new stuff no other service offers. Here are a few of the new features:

* pwyl is a webapp so you don't need to customize or install anything and you aren't tied to any particular browser

* merge pages together - you can combine multiple pages together into one page, and print them as one document. Your changes from the first page are automatically applied to any additional pages.

* pwyl is easy to use - there is a full toolbar, and you can see what you have selected. With Aardvark you have to memorize keyboard commands

* extra features like change text size, font, remove images.

Aargh. I thought the over quota issues had been fixed :-( GAE is a great service, and it makes deploying and hosting an application dead simple, but how it actually works is a big mystery. GAE doesn't give any indication that your application is at or near the limit of a quota. Even now, while PrintWhatYouLike is giving over quota errors, the GAE dashboard for PrintWhatYouLike says that everything is a-ok. DocSavage, I wish I would have taken your advice a few weeks ago:)

It would be great if every site offered a printer-friendly view. The web would be so much more usable. But I also believe the ultimate authority on how a page looks and prints should be you. What if company policies force designers to include ink-draining advertisements on the printer-friendly version (cough cnn.com cough)? What if you don't like the font a page uses, or only want to print part of the page, or want to merge multiple pages into one print job? A printer-friendly stylesheet won't do that for you, but PrintWhatYouLike will. I totally agree that PrintWhatYouLike will mostly be used to get around poorly designed sites, but print stylesheets are only part of the solution. The other part of the solutions is giving you the ability to take a designers page and customize it to suit your own unique needs.

Thanks everyone for the fantastic suggestions!!! The inspiration for the site actually came from wanting a way to print pg's essays without wasting so much paper. If you find any bugs or can't believe we left out your favorite feature, please post it here or contact me at admin@printwhatyoulike.com.