I was so angry that the vendor dropped support that I wrote my own

[davidphilliposter]

 I have a Brother PTouch 2730 label maker, and the Mac software PTouch Editor, dropped support for it in macOS Big Sur 11.0 2020.

I have an old Intel Mac, running the old version of the editor, and I pull it out when I want to run the PTouch.

I am furious that Brother dropped support. How hard can it be, it's just a simple USB device?

So, I went on a quest:

Were there open source printer drivers for it?

I didn't find any Mac software, but I found Linux software. But the Linux command line tool didn't show in macPorts.

So I ported it myself to macOS.

It had two dependencies:

* libUSB - but Google had already done an open source macOS port with the MIT license. I just pulled their source code files into my repository so I could statically link the code and not have to worry about dynamic library search paths.

* libgd - a bitmap image manipulation library. So big I didn't want to mess with it. I wrote my own implementation of the library’s API using Apple’s Core Graphics framework.

I've put my version on https://github.com/DavidPhillipOster/ptouch-print-macOS

Now, I can use the label printer I paid for without the vendor shutting me out.

Comments

[arlie]

Congratulations. May this become a trend that many people follow. I am so sick of vendors essentially demanding I buy a new one, because they failed to support the previous one I bought from them. There's so few suppliers that it's impractical to simply by the replacements from vendors not yet known to behave this way.