save as wwf

Imagine if you couldn't print your pdf files or Word documents. Just think of how many trees you would be saving by not printing unnecessary. Well WWF in Germany have created a new file format, the .wwf, constructed so that it cannot be printed. It's like a pdf format but it just won't let you hit 'print'.

I'm really impressed by this clever thinking - it shows that sometimes we don't need to invent new methods or objects but just think again about the ones we have. But to be realistic we do need to print sometimes, but I think the extra step of converting your wwf to a pdf to print will be a reasonable barrier that will deter waste.

It's also really easy to use: Simply drag an existing pdf to the wwf app icon in your doc and it will duplicate the file as a wwf file, in the same file location as the original. I was able to then open wwf file in Adobe Acrobat and Chrome but not Preview or Word.

You can download the wwf app here (btw the site is in German). Right now it's only available for Mac, with Windows coming soon.

Now the most pressing issue is what do we call these files? Dot-W-W-F is just too long. So how about 'wiffs' or 'woffs'. Got any better ideas?