Free
This one is a no brainer. If you want to visit with Grandma without
crossing state or national lines, there's no better choice of app and
service. When you first run Skype,
it will ask permission to use your webcam and to run in the background.
I was a little disappointed that the Skype app hadn't implemented the
Search charm, so I couldn't use that to find someone among contacts. The
new Skype does integrate Windows Messenger, however. It's full-screen
view of your video-call partner and good use of the Windows 8 touch
interface and notifications are a great start, but you don't get some
Skype for desktop features like multi-party calling and screen sharing.
Download here
Fresh Paint
Free
If you're running Windows 8 on a touch tablet, there's no better
demonstration of the cool types of things you can do with multitouch.
Five simultaneous fingers are supported, and you can actually mix new
colors on a virtual palette. If you'd rather not start with a blank
canvas, "packs" of line drawings and cartoons can get you started. The
Fun Pack is free, but the more artistic Variety Pack is a $1.49 in-app
purchase, and the Adventure Pack, with its 24 character sketches and
Friends Pack of mostly pets cost $1.99 each.
Of course, you can just start finger or mouse painting on a blank page or a photo of your own, with a good variety of brush and pencil tips. You also choose among a dozen canvas and paper textures. Once you're done, you can export your masterpiece to a PNG file, or even use the Share charm to send it to any apps that can share to email, social networks, and more. This is a surprisingly polished app, but it's one that's been around since the early days of Windows 8 prereleases. What's most impressive is that the paint is just so real looking.
Of course, you can just start finger or mouse painting on a blank page or a photo of your own, with a good variety of brush and pencil tips. You also choose among a dozen canvas and paper textures. Once you're done, you can export your masterpiece to a PNG file, or even use the Share charm to send it to any apps that can share to email, social networks, and more. This is a surprisingly polished app, but it's one that's been around since the early days of Windows 8 prereleases. What's most impressive is that the paint is just so real looking.
Download Here
Audible
Free
Audible is a godsend for those of us weary-eyed folk who spend all day staring at a computer monitor. When I get home, I love to read, but being read to instead helps save the old orbs. This book-reading app from Amazon.com is simplicity itself. After signing in, you can browse the extensive catalog of audiobooks—from Tina Fey's hilarious bestseller Bossypants to classics such as the works of Dickens and Twain. You can preview a healthy selection of titles for free, too. There are a couple drawbacks, though: The app doesn't uses the standard Windows 8 Search Charm, and you only get three categories on the main page to browse, and to search, you need to open the sidebar, which is really just a collapsed webpage.
Download here
Netflix
Free (requires subscription)
If you're one of Netflix's 30-plus million subscribers, you'll be happy to know that Windows 8 and RT allow you to get your movie and TV show fix. The app's home page show the 10 ten for you, New Releases, and Genres options, and you can scroll through thumbnail piles of your Instant Queue, Top 10, Popular on Netflix, New Releases, Recently Added, and any of the genres you've shown a predilection for. Clicking on a thumbnail brings up the movie page, which is informative and interactive, letting you rate, play, and see who starred in it. While playing a movie, you can use the app bar to pause, scrub, change volume, or disable/enable subtitles if available.
Download here
OneNote
I was originally planning to include Evernote here, but while that service's Windows 8 app does let you view, tag, search, and add notes, it's pretty primitive compared with the OneNote Windows 8 app. Unlike the rest of Microsoft Office $327.77 at SoftwareMedia.com, OneNote is not a desktop application, but instead offers apps for iOS, Android, Mac, and PC, and Windows Phone, so you're covered when it comes to devices. An insertion wheel lets you add a table, tag, photo, list, or paste to your note. I use this app to take notes at all my vendor meetings, and since I log into the same Microsoft account as on my Windows 8 machine, all my notes were available. I could even play my recording of the meetings, but playback wasn't linked to text as it is in the desktop version.
Download here
Box
Free
Also the productivity veering on business vein, Box (formerly box.net) is an increasingly popular tool for collaboration on work files. It integrates with Salesforce.com and Google Docs, and lets users share online "workspaces." It also lets users assign tasks, post comments, and can notify you when a document involving you has been edited or commented on. With Box, anyone can get 5GB of free online synced storage, and apps are available for all the major mobile and desktop OSes.
Download here
Rowi
Free
No tablet platform is complete without a Twitter app. Windows 8's included People app does show you Twitter (and Facebook updates),but it's not as useful as Twitter's own app for other platforms like the iPad. Until Twitter itself releases a Windows 8 app, there are several choices, among which Rowi stands out. It uses a very clear three column view, with a huge space for the tweet you're viewing in the center. On the left you choose whether to view newsfeed, interactions, directs, and favorites. On the right you see your images and can switch to trending topics. The app lets you use the Share charm from other apps to post tweets, and pops up notifications for new tweets
Download here
Facebook+ Lite
Free
Facebook is in a similar boat to Twitter when it comes to Windows 8 apps: You can get some of its functionality in the OS's People app, but there's no official client app. Keeping with the similarities, there are indeed several Facebook apps available in the Windows Store. Facebook+ Lite is even better than some of the store's paid Facebook apps, which often simply look like nothing more than the social network's website, rather than adding any tablet conveniences. Facebook Touch uses a Windows 8-new-style interface with big buttons and swiping gestures to navigate your news feed, photos, friends, messages, notifications, and events. Its Start menu tile shows your important contacts' latest updates. And it lets you upload photos via the Share charm from the default Photos app.
Download here
USA Today
Free
Of course you could just browse news sites on your Windows 8 PC's web browser, and there are apps for many leading large papers, but USAToday stands out for having created a well-designed, reasonably rich, touch-friendly news app. You scroll through sections for News, Sports, Life, Money, Tech, and Travel, each with buttons to call up relevant photos, videos, and "snapshots" or infographics. For Sports and Money, sections are added for scores and markets. Your local temperature and weather icon appear at top right, and clicking this opens a map and ten day or hourly temperature and precipitation forecasts.
Download here
Kindle
In truth, I'm a Nook user, but I know there are plenty of Kindle users out there who would feel highly put out by a platform with no app for reading their chosen ebook flavor. Kindle for Windows 8 shows large color thumbnails of your book covers in Library view in Cloud and Device sections, the latter for titles you've already downloaded. True to Kindle form, the app supports WhisperSync so that the current page your reading shows up on any device. You can change font size, background colors, and column number, and you can highlight, bookmark, and write notes. Double-clicking a word brings up its Dictionary.com definition. Thankfully, Amazon has added the ability to buy new books from within the app, but not periodicals.
Download here
Nook
Microsoft's investment in Nook has finally paid off in the form of a Windows 8 app. As I mentioned above, I prefer Nook to Amazon's ereader ecosystem, and the Windows 8 store ratings give Barnes & Nobles a slight edge when it comes to Windows 8 apps. The interface is extremely well designed, intuitive, and capable. All the font and navigation options you get on the nook device itself are here. And unlike the Kindle app, in addition to the over 3 million nook books (a million of them free) you can browse and buy new magazine and newspaper issues as well as books right from within the app.
Download here
Music Maker Jam
Free
This musical app from Magix lets you craft tracks by adding loops for drums, bass, brass, pads, synths, and even vocals. You enable and disable instruments and cycle through varying options for each: For example, your synth can have the organ, filler, brute reverb, be choit, unreal, or royal synth sounds. You can raise and lower the volume, and change keys in loops. A very cool Effects graph lets you apply distortions to your whole combo, in heavy and soft, high and low directions. You can record your workOne downside is that it doesn't play while running in the background.
Download here
TuneIn Radio
Free
Another app we loved on iOS arrives for Windows 8. Use it to play any Web-streamed radio broadcast on earth. It can find local radio station, has a sleep timer, and can keep playing in the background while you do other things with your PC. Stream categories include local radio, music, sports, news, and talk. And you can search by other locations or find and play podcasts. I only wish the app let me choose a bit rate for stations that offered several, like those from SomaFM, but it shares that limitation with its iOS version. The latter still has a bunch more features, such as the ability to record and favorite what you're listening to.
Download here
YouCam Mobile
$4.99
CyberLink's video editing software has long garnered top ratings here at PCMag, and now the company has brought some of its expertise over to Windows 8. YouCam lets you manipulate both photos and video even while you're still shooting. You can crop, tag faces, frame, draw on , and stamp photos with stock art like flowers and kissy lips. On top of its photo features, YouCam lets you trim video, and then upload it to YouTube or Facebook.
Download here
CameraStudio+
$2.99
For many of the more tradition photo adjustments—brightness, contrast, white balance, along with artistic filters—look to CameraStudio+, from Moobila. It's surprisingly rich for a $2.99 app, with cropping, resizing, red-eye correction, as well as frames and overlays. Once you're done perfecting and enhancing your photo, you can save it as a JPG or PNG to the folder of your choice or up to the SkyDrive cloud. It's really all you need to improve the photos you snap on your Windows 8 tablet.
Download here
ESPN
Free
With the Super Bowl just behind us, you many wonder why we include a sports app. In fact, you could get by with the included Bing Sports app, which is surprisingly good. But this one comes from the ultimate authority on high-paid play. Sports-related news pieces, scores, videos, photos, and podcasts are at your fingertips with the ESPN Windows 8 app. As with the built-in Sports app, ESPN lets you pin your favorite teams to the Start menu, where you'll see scores and headlines for your clubs. This one is really everything you need to get your fandom on.
Download here
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