This weekend, I came home from Tahoe and found Mac OS X’s Software Update informing me that there were new print drivers available. These usually aren’t the kinds of things that generate much excitement in my home, but in this case I’ve been looking forward to one particular function of my HP 990cse printer to be enabled: dual sided printing.

You see, I’m working on a book for O’Reilly and I’ve found that writing a book, unlike writing an article, requires — no demands — lots of paper. Some edits can be done on screen, but others simply require a print out. Under Windows and Mac OS 9, my favorite way of doing this was to print two pages on each side of a sheet resulting in a 75% reduction in paper usage. I bought this particular HP printer because it could do this in color.

However, under OS X, my printer has only been able to print out on a single side of the page. This has resulted in either me using more paper, or spending time printing first even pages, then odd and hand shuffling the printouts between steps to make everything come out right. You can bet that I didn’t do this too often and simply used more paper.

The hope I had that this issue would be addressed when I saw that there was an update was welcomed by the appearance in my print dialogs of an option to enable two-sided printing. Yay! It’s a little thing in the overall scheme of things, especially on the eve of Apple’s big mystery announcement, but sometimes the little things are truly satisfying in their own ways. In steps both small and large, OS X continues to get better.

What little additions have improved your Mac OS X experience lately?