Shred your documents on the Dashboard

There’s something very satisfying about the way shredding machines eat up your private documents. Of course, you can´t quite shred digital documents in the same way as real ones, but now there’s Shredder Widget.

Shredder Widget acts as a virtual shredder for destroying your most private and confidential information. Shredder Widget has three settings – ‘Low’ for items you’d normally drag to the trash, ‘Medium’, which shreds documents with a US Department of Defense-compliant procedure, and ‘High’, which basically pulps your document into something that can never be recovered. Each procedure uses a different algorithm.

To shred a document, click and drag a file from Finder. Then simply use the F4 Dashboard hotkey (or F12 on on some keyboards) to call up Dashboard. Drop it on the Shredder Widget to permanently erase it from your system. If you want to adjust the shred level while dragging, simply press the spacebar while hovering over the widget. You can even toggle sounds on and off by pressing the ‘s’ key, for maximal authenticity.

Shredder Widget is a clever piece of software, although having to recall the Dashboard every time is a bit annoying. It would be better if you could drag documents to an icon in your Dock or on your dashboard.

Shredder Widget is a fun and secure way to shred your most personal documents.