My 35 TOP Apps for Surface RT / Windows RT .:. Must Have Apps

Please, keep in your mind that I'm a business person and use my Surface RT primarily as a work and personal productivity tool and I'm not a gamer, therefore I listed two games in my selection.

I'm NOT listing the obvious, that is, MS Office for Windows RT, Skype, Mail and Calendar.

The list is NOT in any relevant order.

1. OneNote

Better Notes Taking Apps for Windows RT and Windows 8, but not the best in navigability once it was not conceived with touch screen technology in mind. There's the OneNote Touch Apps. It's cool, but lack some important features of the desktop version.

2. Task Manager Professional

Perfect to keep your tasks in control

3. Calculator2

Once Windows RT doesn't has a touch calculator, this is the best pick. Windows 8.1 RT Preview brought an official touch calculator and it's good as this one.




4. LinkedIn

5. Bing News

getting better each day, I preffer this MS apps than the Bento News. The "Topics creator" is the best thing on it and the RSS news creator is better than the Bento News one (has bugs).

6. PDF Touch

For me, the best PDF reader where you can read, highlight text and scratch on. There's some crash complain on review, but mine works perfect




7. mZIP  - It's always good to have a ZIP file apps to compress/uncompress files

8. NovaMind MindMapping

Nice and cool apps to Mind Map your ideas, projets, concepts.





9. XE Currency - A nice apps to work with currency convertions. You can set your preferred to quick view them and make your convertions

10. Bento News

Good news apps. Bring some nice news sources like Harvard Business Review, Gismodo and many others, but I still prefer Bing News

11. Bing Translator (falar sobre Free Translate)

So cool apps. You can translate text as other, BUT it has a cool feature of pointing your camera to a sign, printed texts and show the translation over the text you have pointed to.  CLICK here to read my review on it.

12. Note Anytime

Very good notes taking apps. The best for handwriting and it has optional handwriting recognition. I've bought the Portuguese one and it works perfect. Take a look on my Notes Taking Apps REVIEW with OneNote, Evernote, Notes Anytime and others.




13. WordBook Dictionary  - Great english-english dictionaty based on Thesaurus and other dics

14. Wikipedia

Nice Wikipedia Apps.

15. ArcNote

Another really cool Notes Taking Apps for Audio, Photo, Text, Scratch and Video notes and the most stable apps on its category. Has one huge flaw: Don't have sync feature. Click HERE for a review on it and other notes taking apps.

16. Twitter

The official one. Perfect to manage your twits

17. FollowMe

Always use this free apps that sends you and email every time your device from your place. You define a "imaginary fence" and the apps sends you an email with it's position (based on IP). I've tested it a lot and it is quite precise (about 100 feet)





18. Voice Notes
19. AcrSoft ShowBiz
20. MegaTube (watch and download Youtube Videos)
21. Bing Travel
22. FlightAware
23. WorldMate
24. PC Remote
25. ListMaster
26. PhotoShop Express
27. YourVersion Bible
28. Google Apps
29. G Maps (Google)
30. EaseUS FileManager

Well, and because everybody deserves some fun, I choose 5 extra APPS for gaming and fun.

31. Pinball FX
32. Drif Mania 2 (car racing)
33. CookBook
34. Places of Interest
35. SkyMap
36. ShareToResize Apps

METRO vs DESKTOP. Why it's so hard to adapt ?

A few minutes ago, I've posted a comment on The Verge online magazine (www.TheVerge.com) where readers were discussing about Desktop and the new Windows 8 Metro UI.

I've seen many people criticizing Microsoft because of the new User Interface. People saying they prefer Windows 7 or even Windows XP.

Below is my post I mentioned above:

METRO vs DESKTOP – it’s quite interesting how people react to the new and to innovation. The world press publish every day hundreds of articles giving kudos to Apple for its innovation. But it’s quite easy to innovate on something people don’t depend on, I mean, almost nobody depend on iPad, iPhone particularly…so there is no long past use of it, there are no thousands of legacy applications, there are no past heavy user experience. It’s much…much harder to innovate on something that have decades of serious and heavy business application, with thousands of legacy applications.  That's Windows OS.
For me, Microsoft is taking a huge risk on building a new and innovative user interface. It would be much more safe (in short term) to keep making things the same way. There won't be complaints, but also no innovation and probably Windows would slowly die. People in general are afraid of innovation and don’t want to learn about new way to do things they have done for years.

Metro UI changes way people do things on a PC and I wouldn't expect more good feedbacks than the bad ones. But the new generation will change user's perception...but it will take time.

 I confess I love Metro, I love real innovation that change things we do on a daily-basis.

 I give kudos to Microsoft for its courage on taking this huge risk.

 If I could, I would prefer all applications based on touch/Metro UI.

The fact that Windows 8 brought a huge innovation on UI doesn't means Windows 8 and next version will succeed, only the time will tell.

But the truth is, if Microsoft keeps it's old UI forever, it will be overcome soon by other new and innovative OS, so, in my opinion, it worth the risk.

ps: My native language isn't English, so, sorry for any mistyping and/or misunderstanding