Internet

Change is never easy, especially when it's one of your favorite services making the changes--and forcing them on you. But, if you're one of the many Twitter users still lamenting the loss of the old-style retweets in the new Twitter, you don't need to be sad any longer. Classic Retweet, a simple Firefox add-on and Google Chrome extension, can return you to the glory days of Twitter's retweet feature, allowing you to append your pithy comments to everything you retweet

Google Docs has unveiled a new research tool meant to help writers streamline their browser-based research, making it easier for them to find and cite the information they need while composing text.

Stick with the original Quickoffice HD app and either Dropbox or Box instead for a more reliable, cheaper alternative

Sick and tired of all that clicking and typing it takes to dial a number in Skype? Give your fingers a break with Dial Directly for Skype, a little utility that allows you to initiate Skype calls by simply pressing a combination of keys. But while it may save your fingers some effort--and may save you the embarrassment of a wrong number--Dial Directly may cost you some time.

In software, "new" all too often means "complicated." New tools often tempt us with futuristic features and promises of improved productivity, but learning to use them can be a confusing experience, not to mention the time lost while trying to get up to speed. So when I see a tool that is truly new, but also manages to be simpler and more streamlined than the current alternatives, I am truly impressed. Hackpad is one such tool: A new breed of Wiki that shows how much simpler and fluid wikis can be.

According to usability guru Jakob Nielsen, when someone visits your website, you have 10 seconds to capture their attention before they decide to move on. Having a fresh slide show lets you combine images, animations, and bold typography to catch a visitor's eye and get them to click deeper into your site. SlideDeck (starting at $79 for a single site) is a sophisticated WordPress plug-in that lets you create high-quality, customizable slide shows that can pull in content from all over the Web, including Google+ Images, Instagram photos, Twitter timelines, Vimeo videos, and much more.

Firefox 11 -- the latest version of Mozilla's popular browser, released on March 13 -- includes only modest improvements over Firefox 10.2, and is unlikely to motivate a large number of people to switch from competing browsers. The upgrade (which is available for several platforms, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Android) now includes the ability to sync add-ons among multiple systems and to import bookmarks, history lists and other data from Chrome.

Motorola's laptop dock for Android smartphones has terrible hardware -- and faces a new generation of post-PC competition

HootSuite is a Web-based service that offers a powerful set of tools for managing multiple social media accounts

Zoho Writer is an online (with offline and syncing functionality) word processing application that offers a nice amount of functionality, especially given the limitations of the Web as a platform for productivity tools. After creating a free account with Zoho, you can access Zoho Writer. It looks a lot like most word processors, so if you've used any major program in this category, it will take no more than a few minutes of poking around to learn how to do things. This is good, because the "Help" is in the form of a FAQ, not a tutorial or index of functions.

It's a fact of modern life that archiving data is essential to prevent a data disaster. Still, something like one-third of computers are never backed up, according to 2,257 respondents in a recent Backblaze poll carried out by Harris Interactive. The survey came to the dismal conclusion that a scant 7% of users practice safe computing by archiving their systems on a daily (or nightly) basis.

Zend Developer Cloud woos PHP developers with enterprise-grade development features, snapshots for easy recovery and project sharing, and promises of single-click cloud deployment