Protect data on lost or stolen Macs

Protect your data on MacBooks and Apple desktops with full disk encryption that’s easy to use and to deploy. SafeGuard encrypts Macs to protect from data breaches, even if the computer is lost or stolen.

• Stay compliant with data security regulations: SafeGuard encrypts the entire disk, including the operating system, page files and data.
• Maintain end-user productivity: SafeGuard for Mac works quickly in the background for user-transparent encryption.
• Improve IT efficiency: With a small standardized install file, SafeGuard features simple local or remote deployment.

Visit the Sophos website for more information.

Apple Insider had posted and article that Amazon releases free beta of Kindle for Mac eBook reading software.

This application allows users from around the world to read Kindle books on their Mac.

Among the features of the new Mac application are:

• Purchase, download, and read hundreds of thousands of books available in the Kindle Store
• Access their library of previously purchased Kindle books stored on Amazon’s servers for free
• Choose from 10 different font sizes and adjust words per line
• Add and automatically synchronize bookmarks and last page read
• View notes and highlights marked on Kindle, Kindle DX, and Kindle for iPhone
• Read books in full color including children’s books, cookbooks, travel books and textbooks

Visit the Apple Insider website for more information.

This update is recommended for all Safari users and includes improvements to performance, stability, and security including:

• Performance improvements for Top Sites
• Stability improvements for 3rd-party plug-ins
• Stability improvements for websites with online forms and Scalable Vector Graphics
• Fixes an issue that prevented Safari from changing settings on some Linksys routers

Visit the Apple website for more information.

Panic noticed that something interesting was happening with PDF files created by Adobe Illustrator. Like many developers, Panic uses Adobe Illustrator to create icons and other image resources for their applications. The resulting PDF files, which were relatively “big-boned” (a politically-correct way of saying “fat”), would magically shrink in size when they were run through Apple’s Mac OS X PDF processing. Apple’s method is used when you save a PDF from Preview, which explains why most of the time those files are fairly small in size.

The Panic engineers decided to look into the cause of this. What did they find? Swatches, patterns, preview bitmaps, all sort of metadata; even though we’d specifically turned off all the extra options when saving from Illustrator: Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities, Embed Page Thumbnails, etc.”

Apparently just opening the obese PDFs in Preview and then saving them would shrink the file sizes dramatically. Rather than force their staff to go through this process each time they found a large Illustrator PDF, Panic did what most developers would do and wrote an application to automate the process. Devs can simply take a big batch of files, like the contents of an application’s Resources folder, drop ‘em onto ShrinkIt (download link), and watch the file sizes magically shrink. According to Panic, ShrinkIt can reduce an app bundle size by 4 megabytes.

While ShrinkIt is a Panic-internal utility, the company has made it available to the world for free. Please note that ShrinkIt is primarily made for shrinking simple vector-resource PDFs, and probably won’t work well on press-ready PDFs.

Visit the Tuaw website for full information