Love or Hate Mac's, one thing they got right - Bonjour.
August 5th, 2008
So I spent about an hour setting up a new printer on my parents two windows boxes last night, It was a fancy schmancy network printer that even had WiFi built into it. So After the drivers were installed (its an HP by the way) I try to just go to the network settings on the computer and point the “add printer network printer” at it. No dice, I fiddle with it for about 10-15 mins and nothing, it won’t see the printer or if it does it asks me for a password to access it (apparently it was trying to access the card readers on the printer, bizarre).
So of course I end up looking through the manual and finally give in and load up the CD that came with the printer and there is a network setup program that you have to run from the CD. That really didn’t make much since to me but, it did work at least.
So enter my mac this morning, fire up the pinter prefrerence pane and of course when I click add printer there is the printer. Why is it so easy? Bonjour. Bonjour is a service discovery protocol that goes way back in the Apple OS. It makes it stupid simple to setup any network device and I wish that every OS on the planet had Bonjour integrated into it. Imagine how much less time we (us computer guru’s who support our family’s PC’s) would spend trying to troubleshoot add a silly printer connection.
You can read more about Bonjour and even add it to your Windows box (something I probably should have done) here: Read via Apple
August 5th, 2008 at 09:57 AM
Bonjour is great, for people who can’t figure out TCP/IP networking. Unfortunately that’s about all it’s useful for. There’s a number of downsides to the service and, frankly, I’m happy that PCs don’t come pre-configured with it by default. It makes me shiver to think that the network traffic would look like on large LANs.
August 5th, 2008 at 11:01 AM
Hellz yeah. Bonjour is great.
I disagree with TJ in that it’s not for people who don’t understand TCP/IP. It’s for people who have better things to do, and my mom, LOL.
Why waste cycle setting a printer up on a network? Plug it in, the mac sees it.
If a network isn’t gigabit, it should be, though I suppose it’s one of those things that == fewer admins needed, maybe.
I dunno, but I know when we add gear at the house, my macs all have no problems, while my wife’s PeeCee has to be futzed with, and invariably the install CD comes out or we visit the gear makers website, weak sauce!
August 5th, 2008 at 12:04 PM
Yeah my first thought was, I know tcp/ip networking, still couldn’t get the printer going, I knew its IP address, just needed the “magic” HP disk. I prefer no magic when configuring devices… reminds me of when plug and pray was touted as the great gift by M$ to the world.
I’d love to see what the network traffic would look like with a bunch of mac’s all using bonjour… doubtful that it would make much of an impact, even on a non-gigabit network.
August 5th, 2008 at 11:59 PM
In regards to PnP, it works very well and the concept was actually adopted by pretty much every other manufacturer out there. I’d say it works pretty well. Additionally, MS has UPnP, a competitor to Bonjour which also has it’s pros and cons.
I guess I am a minimalist. Keep unnecessary traffic off the network which means less potential for security breaches. It also means less devices on the network configured by people who aren’t aware of how networking really works, don’t care about network security or think that broadcasting data constantly from many devices is low impact :P