One small but welcome addition to Windows 8 is its new extended screen capture feature. Press Win+PrtSc and you’ll both grab the current screen, and save it directly to disk, which means there’s no longer any need to do the Alt+Tab, Edit > Paste, File > Save shuffle for every single image.

This is only a very small step forward, of course: the chances are you’ll still need to spend plenty of time editing your grabs before they’re ready for use. And so a better approach might be to install a tool like the free HotShots, which not only captures screens for you, but also provides some excellent editing tools to help you get them ready for prime time.

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Software developers face many challenges, but perhaps the greatest of all is figuring out how to make their program stand out from the crowd.

You could focus on a single key function, for instance, and make that just as good as it can be. But if that’s a problem, then you can always follow the example of do-everything MP3 tool z33k, and cram it with as many features as you can think of (and then a few more, for good measure).

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USB keys are a cheap and convenient way to carry important files around. Unfortunately they’re also common carriers of autorun viruses, which write themselves to the drive in an attempt to infect other systems. The risk can be reduced by turning off autorun, if it’s not disabled already (and it will be on most modern PCs), but for extra security you might prefer NTFS Drive Protection, which prevents anyone writing to the drive at all.

The program is compact (a 642K download), portable and easy to use. Launch Ntfs Drive Protection, select your USB drive in the “Target Drive” box, click “Start Protection” – and that’s it. In just a few seconds the program will change your file and folder permissions, and no-one (not even you) will be able to add new files to the drive, or edit what’s already there.

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Microsoft has today announced the launch of Office Mobile for Office 365, an iPhone app which allows users to access, view and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents.

As you’ll probably have figured out from its name, the new release requires an Office 365 subscription before it’ll do anything useful (although the app itself is free). But with that hurdle overcome, you’ll find there’s plenty of functionality here to explore.

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Freeware digital art creation tool FotoSketcher 2.45 has been released by French author David Thoiron. FotoSketcher, also available in portable form, provides quick and easy tools for Windows users wishing to transform digital photos into virtual works of art.

Version 2.45 introduces a new stylised effect (Emergence 2) and improves on an existing brushstrokes-based effect. It also includes a number of minor bug fixes and coincides with the author making a series of scripts available for download.

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Converting videos into a web-friendly format isn’t particularly difficult. There are a host of free transcoding tools – like Freemake Video Converter, say – which can import just about any source movie, and convert it to FLV or WEBM in just a few clicks.

If you regularly need to convert videos and make them ready for use online, though, you might benefit from using a more specialist tool, like EasyFLV Web Video Encoder. It doesn’t have anything like the power of the generic transcoders, but it’s far easier to use, while also including a few time-saving extras which you won’t always see elsewhere.

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Most web pages work just as you expect. You can browse them, left-click here, right-click there, and leave whenever you like – which is just as it should be.

Other sites aren’t quite so straightforward, unfortunately. They might disable the right-click menu. Prevent you copying text. Maybe even try to stop you leaving a particular page. It’s annoying, but the Firefox add-on RightToClick does at least give you a very effective way to fight back.

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Bilbao, Spain-based Panda Security has released Panda Cloud Antivirus Free 2.2, a major new version of the company’s cloud-based antivirus tool. Version 2.2 adds a number of notable new features, including protection against data theft through malware infection and parental control tools.

The new version also bundles a bootable rescue creation tool and also adds support for access in Safe mode, ensuring it’s more capable of dealing with stubborn malware that proves hard to shift or even cripples the user’s PC entirely.

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Subways can be a great way to get around a big city, but of course you have to understand their layout, first. That can be a challenge, particularly if you leave it until the last minute, and are left peering at a huge map on a tiny smartphone screen (that’s if you can get a signal at all). But plan ahead with a little help from qMetro and your life could be very much easier.

An open source tool available for Windows, Linux, OS X and more, qMetro comes bundled with 23 maps covering subways in many big cities: Amsterdam, Beijing, Berlin, Brussels, London, Madrid, Moscow, New York, Paris, Tokyo and others. But if that’s not enough, there are something like 200 maps available online (and in theory, at least, you can even create more yourself).

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Twitter has released TweetDeck 3.0.2 for Windows, a major new build of its desktop Twitter client. The new release adds support for minimising the application to the Taskbar Notification area, plus unveils a new layout, followers column and additional search filters.

TweetDeck is designed to make it easier to track real-time conversations as well as monitor specific Twitter feeds or hashtags through the use of a multi-columned layout. Users can also access TweetDeck via their browser using its web-based app, which also recently gained a redesign.

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The BBC has launched a dedicated app for mobile users of its meteorological website. BBC Weather for Android 1.0.4 and BBC Weather for iPhone 1.0.1 provide smartphone users with an elegant, simple means of accessing the latest BBC Weather forecasts.

Although aimed primarily at UK users, the app can also be used abroad, with coverage extended to providing forecasts for major cities worldwide. Users can also build up a library of favourite locations, checking forecasts for each simply by swiping vertically between them.

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