ShrinkIt 1.3

From the desk of
Cabel
Engineering Dept.

ShrinkIt 1.3

February 10th, 2015

Quite some time ago, we made a quick, free, handy tool called ShrinkIt®.

(Yes, we actually have a registered trademark on ShrinkIt®. Why not!)

ShrinkIt takes bloated Adobe-saved graphic PDFs, runs them through Apple’s PDF renderer, and saves them back out, making many of them smaller without any quality loss.

Note, though: it’s not really for long complex PDF documents or bitmap images. It’s generally for simple PDF symbols and glyphs you might use in your apps, where saving space is critical.

We’ve just updated ShrinkIt to version 1.3, and wanted to let you know!

ShrinkIt Release Notes:

Processing is now threaded and significantly faster.
It’s now properly signed with our Developer ID
There’s a new icon
And it’s now Retina-ready
1.3 — Fixed exception when dealing with Unicode file paths
1.3 — Added cool progress bar and gratuitous animation

Two important ShrinkIt instructions:

If a finished file is not smaller after being processed, it will not be saved.
Your original files are renamed with the prefix “_org_” just in case.

Download ShrinkIt 1.3.2

1.0M .ZIP -- Requires Mac OS X 10.7

We hope it serves you well.

UPDATE 2/11: We bumped it to 1.3.
UPDATE 2/13: Aaaaaand 1.3.2 fixes some problems with 10.7 and 10.8.

Posted at 3:53 pm 12 Comments

eric

2/10/2015 9:26 PM

Thanks for free app. Really appreciate it.
I download it and run it, test it on one of pdf that I have and it just crashed, try it again with diff. pdf and also crashed.
Do you want me to send you my crashlog ? I’m running beta 10.10.3 just FYI.

Andy M

2/11/2015 3:44 AM

Thanks for this! Just reduced the size of one of my apps by 17%! (It wasn’t a huge app to begin with, but hey every byte counts, right?)

Cabel

2/11/2015 3:34 PM

Eric: We’ve fixed that bug and bumped it to 1.3! Enjoy.

NikP

2/11/2015 5:53 PM

Man, I love you guys. I use shrink it all the time. Glad to see it’s still getting attention.

Ben Christine

2/12/2015 1:30 AM

Impressive app. well done and thank you!

Justin

2/13/2015 10:21 AM

Just tried it out and seems great for text-based PDF’s, but not so much for outlined text and photo-heavy documents. Any chance of getting that type of support in ShrinkIt®?

Comparing it to smallpdf.com/compress-pdf, I was able to reduced a document from 6.3MB to 2.4MB and another from 7.5MB to 4.6MB—but ShrinkIt wasn’t able to reduce them at all.

I know it’s a free product and you have other important work to do, but figured I’d ask!

Cabel

2/13/2015 1:23 PM

Justin: As we note above, “it’s not really for long complex PDF documents or bitmap images.” We didn’t write any compression code — we’re just running it through Apple’s rendered. So there’s nothing we can really do — it’s more of a developer tool. :) But thanks for asking!