It would be so helpful if the author would make a simple statement at the beginning of the video about what this does and why it is useful. Over ten minutes into the video, we have no idea. Read the project description on Github, still no idea.<p>Why not start with, "This project creates a virtual printer that advertises itself with Bonjour and writes a postscript file to local storage." Follow that with a simple statement about why that is cool and what you can do with the file, which is still not apparent.<p>Obfuscation has become the norm.
I've just recently discovered NodeJS -- heard about it for years, of course. I was able to create a web server for one of my group's web apps in about 5 lines of code. It's a bit weird to wrap one's mind around it at first, but then it starts to make a lot of sense.<p>This IPP server is cool, though I'm not sure what uses it has yet. Maybe just a handy way to print to disk without having to choose a folder and file name. Or use as a proxy to redirect print requests to different printers depending on size or type of print job. Or a way to queue up print requests until off-hours. This is just off the top of my head and I'll bet there are other cool uses as well.
That had absolutely nothing to do with making printers great (again).<p>Printers suck a putting stuff on paper, doing a digital copy via a printer protocol doesn't fix that. It's neat and there might be some interesting use cases, but it doesn't fix what's wrong with printers.<p>I'm not even sure that printers where ever that great. Printers seems like devices that sort of peaked 40 years ago. Since then they have gradually decreased in quality. Printing 1000+ pages a day seems to be a little much to ask from many printers, they simply wear out to quickly. The whole process of looping paper around inside something that fits on a desk (sort of), combined with cheap plastic parts is a receipt for disaster.<p>Software-wise the manufacture should stop trying to add more feature that no one while ever use and instead work on making "cancel print job" actually work. The number of times a printer (driver?) has chosen to pick the wrong paper-tray is mind boggling. Why are there even multiple trays, we only ever need to print on standard A4 paper? Sadly picking a printer where the hardware quality will support the volume also result in feature bloat.<p>I really hate printers, and no amount of Javascript will make them any better.