The Best Windows 8 Apps You Can Run On Your Desktop

Even if you bypass Windows 8′s “modern” UI entirely using a tool like Start8 or Classic Shell, there are some great apps available for it. Thanks to ModernMix, an app that lets you run full-screen Windows apps in regular windows, you can get the best of both worlds: useful applications in normal desktop windows.

When Windows 8 came out, a lot of great apps also landed. However, some people don’t run full-screen apps in Windows 8 and go right to the desktop instead. Well, love it or hate it, Windows 8 and its “modern UI” is here to stay (at least until Microsoft brings back the start button), and since ModernMix makes it easy to run those full-screen apps in Windows on the desktop, it’s time to take another look at some great, unique Windows 8 apps that you should try.

Groove Music Player is popular on iOS, and we were thrilled when it launched on Windows 8. Its predictive mixes and automatic tagging and organisation of your music collection makes it a must-have app, but if you’re no fan of Windows 8′s modern UI, we can understand why you would have passed it over. With ModernMix, you can run Groove in a window like any other music player and take advantage of all of its features. It will still set you back $3.99, but we think that’s a decent price to pay for an attentive developer, an app that automatically downloads album artwork, lyrics, Last.fm data and auto-tags your tracks for later. Plus, Groove’s automatically generated mixes are so good you’ll wonder how you lived without them.

If you’d rather watch your own videos, the Plex app for Windows 8 is extremely well built and designed, and it runs perfectly even in a window. You could download the standard Plex Media Center app for Windows instead, but the Windows 8 app really does look nice, even when compared to the full Media Center app. Plus, if you can run it in Windowed mode and not turn your entire system into a media centre every time you want to use it, why wouldn’t you? This way you can stream music while minimised, or put the Plex app on a different display and watch video (and still use your primary display for something else) without interrupting your flow.