Quite apart from the technical challenges of developing mobile websites, the sheer hassle of having to refresh one or more mobile devices every time you make a change is enough to drive designers to distraction.

Adobe Shadow aims to eliminate this wearying process and marks a welcome return to innovative form for a company that, to me at least, seems to have stagnated lately. Furthermore, this is a tool that could only have been dreamt up by someone actively developing websites, and if this means Adobe is getting closer to its users and responding to their needs, that can only be a good thing.

As with so many good ideas, the principle is simple (in retrospect). Once set up, the contents of your desktop web browser are displayed on the screen of the mobile device, rendered natively. So the design process is no more onerous than for standard websites: make a change, hit refresh and watch it appear on all connected devices. This is actually rather magical when you first experience it, but it very quickly becomes an invaluable resource, almost like having several attached monitors.

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Relations here at PC Pro have been a little strained these past few weeks, the main bone of contention being the merits (or otherwise) of Windows 8’s new approach to finding and launching desktop applications. There’s no dispute that, for touch devices, Metro is a workable and even likeable system. But there’s plenty of frustration over the way Microsoft seems determined to force it on desktop users too, to the extent of replacing the Start menu with a full-screen Metro page.

So I’m indebted to reader Neale Killick for bringing to my attention a free little tool called Start8, by Stardock software, which promises to “bring back the Windows Start menu”. Install it within the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and a comfortingly familiar Start orb appears at the left end of your primary taskbar. Click it, though, and what opens isn’t the much missed Windows 7 Start menu – but a miniature Metro Start screen.

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I’m a massive fan of Spotify and gladly pay my monthly £10 to access music on my mobile, but I can’t be alone in despairing every time I open up the app on my Android phone.

Take a look at the desktop software: a range of apps, handy for discovering new music, the radio, and easy access to thousands of public playlists.

The mobile app – at least on Android and iPhone – seems stagnant. I’ve been using Spotify for about a year, and I can’t remember the last time a useful feature was implemented during an update. Instead, it’s easy to put together a list of stuff it’s missing. Those three features I listed in the second paragraph, for instance.

Other omissions are more basic. Take the starred list: on desktop, like virtually every media playback application in existence, I can organise by a number of factors, including the name of the track, the artist, when the song was added and the track’s length. On mobile, meanwhile, the list is presented in the order in which it was made, with no other options available. Read more

Apple announced its latest iPad on 7 March, and the world went into predictable meltdown, with demand already causing delays to orders. Two Londoners had a far simpler way of coping with such exciting news — march down Regent Street on Saturday – that’s 10 March, almost a week before launch – plonk down a couple of chairs, and wait.

First in the queue is 21-year-old Zohaib Ali, and he’s sat alongside 18-year-old friend Ali Tarighi. They’re slumped next to the Apple Store’s main entrance, with bags of fizzy drinks strewn around, and there’s no doubt the two attract plenty of glances in the middle of a busy day.

Zohaib explained that he’s a veteran when it comes to extreme Apple queuing. “I did this for the iPhone 4S and the iPad 2″, he says, and there’s a clear reason why he’s willing to put himself through such a ordeal: “because we want to be first.” Read more

A porn distributor is working with a third-party firm to send letters threatening legal action to accused illegal file-sharers unless they stump up hundreds of pounds in settlements.

Regular readers of PC Pro will be feeling a bit of déjà vu at the moment, but I’m not talking about Andrew Crossley’s ill-fated “speculative invoicing” affair, which ended with the ACS Law solicitor declaring bankruptcy and suspended from practising his profession for two years.

Rather unbelievably, an entirely different porn company is trying the same trick (and has been for some time) — even though its lawyers dropped out last year.

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Intel’s new Xeon E5 series will be powering plenty of application servers in the near future. But at CeBIT, high-end hardware company SuperMicro has demonstrated another use for the platform: as the basis of a GPU-based supercomputer. Read more

Last September, at IFA, Sasha Muller experienced Sony’s HMZ-T1 Personal 3D Viewer and was suitably impressed. Now, at CeBIT, optics giant Carl Zeiss has got in on the action with its slightly sinister-looking Cinemizer OLED headset display.

As the name suggests, Zeiss’ 3D goggle display uses OLED technology to produce an image that’s startlingly bright and vibrant – though, it must be said, not as immersive as Sony’s, owing to a conservative frame size that simulates a 40in display at two meters. Resolution isn’t stellar either: at 870 x 500 per eye, there’s enough detail to enjoy movies and the like, but the image has a definite pixelated quality. On the plus side, the 3D effect is rock solid – as it should be, since each eye gets its own dedicated screen. Read more

The original Archos 80 G9 Android tablet was released in October. It turned heads with its unusual 8in frame and, more to the point, its £200 price tag for the 8GB model. The general consensus, however, was that it felt cheap and plasticky, and the screen suffered from an annoying “ripple” effect when the slightest pressure was applied to the casing.

Archos hasn’t given up on the idea, though, and at CeBIT we had the chance to play with its revision of the 80 G9.

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The tablet we’ve all been expecting was finally unveiled by Apple CEO Tim Cook today, ending a week of feverish speculation in the press. And “the new iPad” as it’s entirely uninspiringly named, is very much as expected.

The headline upgrade is the move to a higher resolution, ‘Retina’-style display at an astonishing 2,048 x 1,536. That’s higher even than the Asus Transformer Prime’s 1,920 x 1,200 screen, which we looked at last week in Barcelona, and leads to a total pixel count of 3.1 million.

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When your PC is behaving erratically, tracking down the culprit can be a titanic task, involving swapping out the memory, CPU, graphics card, power supply, motherboard and more. At CeBIT, German system specialist Toolhouse has been demonstrating hardware diagnostic tools which can take the pain out of the process.

The principle is simple: boot from a USB stick into ToolHouse’s bespoke test environment and all components will be thoroughly tested, including the CPU, drives, memory, graphics and networking hardware. For more insidious problems, ToolHouse also makes a PCI card with its own two-digit LED display providing easy-to-decode numeric status codes (useful for motherboards that lack them) and convenient contact points for attaching your own electrical meter.

For now, ToolHouse’s main business is in Germany, though English-language versions of its tools are available on request. If you’d like to try out its tools, and brush up your German at the same time, you can download trials of some of ToolHouse’s products. Be warned, it doesn’t come cheap: the Windows-based diagnostic suite costs €229, while the full Linux-based suite costs a steep €299. But for a busy IT department that could pay for itself very quickly indeed.