The Flashback Trojan went viral last week, infecting an estimated 1 percent of OS X computers worldwide. While the infection rate has subsided since then, that doesn't mean Mac owners should return to complacency.

It doesn't mean that there's cause for panic, either. Here are some common sense, effective tips for safeguarding your Mac against more malware.

The default options for viewing PDF documents in OS X are Apple's built-in rendering technologies available in Safari and Preview; however, there are times when some documents will not display properly in these programs. In these instances, you can use Adobe Reader and its accompanying Web plug-in to usually view these documents with success.

For those who use Adobe's Reader and Acrobat programs, Adobe has issued an update that fixes a couple of security holes in the program that could cause the program to crash and allow arbitrary execution of code. While this reasoning has been regularly issued with software updates from Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, and other companies, the latest news regarding malware on OS X should exemplify why these bugs are fixed and why users should apply even the smallest software patches.

The updates released today are for Adobe Reader X (10.1.3) and Adobe Reader (9.5.1) for those who cannot install the preferred Reader X software. Currently the vulnerabilities in Reader and Acrobat have only been exploited in Windows versions of the software, but there is a possibility that the Mac versions of this software could be targeted as well.

In addition to fixing security flaws, the Reader and Acrobat updates address problems with loading their accompanying Web plug-ins in Safari under 64-bit mode (the default mode for current and recent versions of Safari).

These updates are available on the Adobe Web site at the foll... [Read more]

In-app purchasing is now available in Amazon's Appstore.

Developers now have a new way to monetize their applications in Amazon's Appstore.

The e-retail giant announced today that the Amazon Appstore now allows developers to integrate in-app purchasing. Amazon plans to take 30 percent of the revenue generated from each transaction, matching Apple's App Store revenue share.

Amazon's in-app purchasing platform takes advantage of the accounts Amazon customers have already set up both online and on their Kindle Fire. In addition, Amazon says that the in-app payments will support the one-click purchasing that its online customers are already familiar with.

"In-App Purchasing is simple to integrate and gives developers access to millions of Amazon customers who are already familiar with Amazon's 1-Click payment system," Amazon's Appstore director Aaron Rubenson said today in a statement. "Many of Amazon Appstore's customers have shopped with Amazon before and they trust Amazon's easy payment process, which leads to higher conversion of developers' in-app content and subscriptions."

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The biggest change to the new Chrome OS interface is the ability to have multiple browser windows, each movable and resizable. Previously, the windows had only a full-screen view. And across the bottom is a task bar with shortcuts and system status details.

In the computing world right now, there are two general ways to show windows on a screen: with the window taking up the entire screen, as on smartphones and tablets; or with resizable, overlapping windows, as on personal computer OSes.

Until yesterday, Google's browser-based operating system, Chrome OS, fell into the former camp. Users had no choice but to see browser pages and run browser apps at the full size of the screen. That changed with a new window manager that debuted with Chrome OS 19.0.1048.17, released in a developer build.

With the Chromebook notebooks that are the sole way of getting Chrome OS today, being limited to full-screen pages isn't a big deal: the laptop screen isn't that big, so it's useful to see as much as you can, and the tabs across the top provide an obvious way to switch among browser windows.

But evidently Google wanted the Chrome OS to be more like Microsoft Windows and Apple's Mac OS X. That's smart, given how many people are familiar with those ope... [Read more]