The amount of harried printing situations I’ve been party to has dropped dramatically since I finished school, but Google’s new update to their Cloud Print service should have you covered if you can’t say the same.
According to a post on the official Chrome blog Google has baked the ability to print to any FedEx Office location right into Cloud Print, so you’ll be push your documents from Chrome, Google Docs, or your Android device to a participating store and pick up it whenever you need to.
When I took the service for a spin, the process of actually creating the job took a shade under 30 seconds seconds — from there, I was greeted with an email mentioning that my document was now ready to print at a local FedEx Office. As long as you’ve remember to keep the retrieval code from the email handy, you’re all set to pick up your sales report (or printed copy of Charge of the Like Brigade) when you need to.
It isn’t a dealbreaker if you can’t get down there immediately though, as the document will continue to live in the cloud for ten days. After that, you’re plumb out of luck (unless you pop into Chrome and Cloud Print it again). I imagine that not everyone will be too pleased with this development — companies like Breezy have working to remove the friction from mobile printing for quite a while, and now they’ve got other competitor to deal with.
Strangely enough, Google also announced that Cloud Print can now send documents to Ice Cream Sandwich-powered devices that have the Chrome for Android beta installed. It doesn’t strike me as a huge improvement over, say, just sticking it in Google Docs, but it’ll do in a pinch if you’re ever in need of a slightly-clunkier version of Instapaper.