Best Windows 8.1 Apps for Your New PC

Whether you already own a Windows 8.1 computer or expect to get (or give) one this holiday season, you can make the most of it by downloading these five apps.

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Metro Skype sucks .
Onedrive calendar is the only thing which is somewhat useful as it does work your androids calendar.

 

Why would you recommend Tapatalk? That makes no sense for a PC. The interface and capabilities of Tapatalk are severely degraded compared to visiting the forum in a browser. It is meant to be used on phones where the regular forum website is not very practical to use and to reduce data usage.

 

Only five Metro applications? Man, a person who made this article must be even lazier than I am!

 

I had high hopes for convertibles but I've been deeply disappointed in the app selection over the past two years. Halo: Spartan Assault and Flipboard are the only two I use with regularity.

 

Yup. However I managed to find most of the things I need, except for a proper offline dictionary (I just installed a desktop program) and a decent PDF viewer, which made me, for the first time ever, spend money on an application.
News readers were also a hit for miss. Used News Republic, then tried Flipboard, but in the end moved back to default news application. The rest, there's always an Internet browser, and quite capable at that.

 

Tell me about it. It was hard enough to find five to put in the article in the first place.

 

Yeah, no kidding.

Tapatalk, I use on my Windows tablet, Netflix and Kindle as well, but the Kindle app isn't exactly stellar. Aside from that, the weather app and calendar app pretty much round up the apps I use. Oh and Drawboard PDF, but unless you have a stylus, there's no point in getting it.

 

My 8" tablet has full win 8.1, not much bigger than some phones these days. I do rather use browser but Tapatalk aint that bad option. I just forget to use it most of the time.

Especially since latest chrome has severe issues with touch interface... I'll probably use Tapatalk more.

Next challenge: 5 best 8.1 games with touch interface
Add one level: not made by Microsoft.

 

That is a tough one. Considering most of better ones are usually fremium (like Asphalt or Hill Climb Racing). In Metro mode I usually keep to the simple games, Sudoku, hangman, jigsaw puzzle, dominos, etc. Really wish there were proper touch controls for South Park The Stick Of Truth. That game would be ideal for touch devices! There's a program however, which can make pretty much any game touch compatible. It's called GestureWorks Gameplay. Still a bit wonky, but I guess it makes the job done. Civilization 5 is also kinda badly implemented on Atom devices, can't run it in touch mode.

For applications I also use:
Here Maps - maps by Nokia, which I found to be better than default navigation application. Maps can also be downloaded, make a route, shows what's near, and all that usual mumbo jumbo.
Metro Command Pro - sort of file explorer in Metro environment. I like it because it has some advanced features for free and you have kinda two windows open at the same time, so moving stuff and such is easier.
Calculator^2 - calculator, currency and ordinary converter all together. Also like it better than the default one. Converter is a bit clunky though, but has a big list of units to choose from.
MediaMonkey - doesn't have the best GUI, but unlike Xbox Musix doesn't try to sell you any crap and can actually play more formats. And doesn't crash like VLC (when I tried VLC some time back it sure sucked, dunno how it is now).
Aspiration Clock - needed a live clock tile. Can be customized quite good.
DrawboardPDF - a bit more advanced PDF viewer. Paid.
FL Studio Groove - good for messing around (and not) and try to create some music. Paid.
Function Plotter - what name says. I use it when I don't want to fire up MS Mathematics.
Fotor - image/photo editor. Can edit RAW files as well.
Tablature - guitar tabs. Unfortunately doesn't support GuitarPro format.

The rest are default applications (Weather, News, Skype, Onedrive, etc.). Those are enough for me, but can see how other people can be dissatisfied, especially if coming from iOS or Android. But as far as there's the best ever app there (Internet Explorer, which is pretty great in Metro), I'll be fine.

 

Alright. Alright.

Lemme help y'all out. All free apps.

READER: Book Bazaar reader - reads EPUB, PDF, MOBI, etc. Reads files off the cloud or off your local storage. Animated page flips, multiple bookmarks. Lots of customizations. It's really good stuff.

RACING GAME: Asphalt 8 Airborne. If you can't have fun playing this game, you're just too stuffy. Yes. You. Are.

TRANSLATOR: Bing Translator - has an OCR so you can point your tablet's camera at a sign in a foreign language or a book page and it superimposes the translation on screen. Too cool for words.

YOUTUBE CLIENT: Hyper. Ummph. Just check it out. Nice interface and you can download the videos in MP4 format and audio in MP3.

TEXT EDITOR; Notepad Classic. Pretty full featured text editor that can access your cloud (OneDrive, Box, DropBox) and local storage. Has spell check and suggestions, search, replace, and date/time stamp. Word count also.

Remote Desktop Client: Splashtop Personal. Install the client on a computer you want to access remotely and it let's your tablet take complete control of it.

 

That's not the problem. The game itself is quite good. Nice controls, graphics, UI. My main problem is, it's fremium. I just installed Burnout Paradise (game can be bought very often for cheap). Happy as a clam and problem solved .

Thanks. I'm fine with watching YT vids on IE, but it's always nice to be able to DL dome videos.

 

TeamViewer also has an app that you can use to remote into other computers and it's free.

 

Nice work Mr. 2.0 (and how the heck you been?)

I just wanna say, the difficulties people are having with this task point to the misconception about Win 8-based devices vs. Android/iOS devices. The former is a desktop operating system and, in the main, you use "legacy" programs (we call them "apps" these days!) or bookmarked web sites to do our stuff. Advantages include diversity, legacy continuity, access to power programs even on 12 oz $199 slates, best browsers by far. (Also, can be very productive on slate-only devices due to availability of excellent Wacom and increasingly other penabled digitizers.

On the other hand, there's the consumption-oriented (though becoming more productive every day) tablets first brought to market with the first iPad, now loaded with Android and ever more perfected iPads. They ushered in an entirely new paradigm of doing stuff (initially, looking at and listening to stuff): the "App." When you strip through the marketing BS, apps are little more than standalone or Internet-based programs that have been designed for superb user-friendliness, virtually instant installation, launch and often easy to learn quickly. And they are designed for maximum eye candy, taking advantage of the insanely great displays these devices had, a couple of years ahead of laptops, which now have the same caliber screens. They tend to often function similarly to Windows/Mac programs and run compatibly with them. Oh, and, they're free or a couple of bucks, whereas reasonably useful software on desktop operating systems tended to cost $30-$many hundreds in the "good old days."

I guess I'm just trying to point out that much of this is old product in new bottles, vastly lowered prices, often lower quality but plenty of great stuff. But try to duplicate the "app" experience in W8 or OSX and the tablets will always come out way ahead because they are truly special purpose "players" of the apps made for them while desktop (includes laptop) computer OS are general purpose devices, loaded with power and capacity but originally built to have large companies spend millions to develop software so that these then-amazingly-cheap machines could do what room-size computers were needed to execute a decade before.

So now we have the issue of convergence. Apple is clearly trying to converge iOS and OSX with each new version. Windows is trying to to move in the same direction, but since 99% of their unit volume remains computers (vs. phones, tablets) they will never be able to grow a developer community to write app-style programs to run on the few Windows phones and tablets being sold. (BTW, I am an extremely Windows/computer-biased person, so believe me, it pains me to acknowledge that Windows is losing ground in the consumer market with each passing year and model run!)

Not the most well-constructed, thought-provoking piece, but does anyone think there's validity to what I've said, and to why at best one can come up with two handfuls of Windows apps worth using?

 

I think there's value in what you said.

Tablets are more or less exclusively for consumption especially the Android ones. Even in the notebook market it's become increasingly difficult to find consumer devices that are actually designed with a thought towards productivity aka the creation of value. Just look at the keyboard layouts on new notebooks like the Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro. These days it's all about overloading the consumer's senses with a dazzling design and overly bright screen. I'm quite alarmed by all of this. Consumers are more servile and profligate than ever (which is not necessarily something they can in large part be blamed for) which means these trends will continue.

Anyways - maybe in a decade we'll all look back on Windows 8 and say "so that's what Microsoft was getting at" if they make ....whatever they were trying to get at worthwhile. For now it stands in my view a miserable attempt at a hybrid between a phone and a personal computer, two devices whose practical purposes continue to enjoy but a small and insignificant overlap.