First thing first, I developed many apps myself, but I won't mention them here, to avoid making this a self-promotion kind of post. I will also omit to mention the most famous apps like Word or Google Chrome purposely.

Below is a non-exhaustive list of apps for Windows I love and would like to share with you all. They only reflect my preferences and my own experience, so it's highly possible I didn't list some other amazing apps. Feel free to add yours!

General

– Typedown (free) – My favorite app for writing text in Markdown. I wrote this Reddit post with it actually!

– Storylines (free) – I recently started writing a book (my first one). So far, this app is awesome for this purpose. Although I may switch very soon to something more resilient. I do not know how it scales with a 100+ page book.

– Keystro (free) – In a recent public speaking session I did, I wanted to teach the audience some keyboard shortcuts on Windows. Keystro was awesome for this because it was showing on screen the keys I'm pressing on my keyboard in real-time, making the presentation easier for the audience as they can see the shortcut and its effect.

– ePub+ (free) – Not the most popular eBook reader, but I like it for how minimalistic yet modern-looking app. It's all I expect from a book reader.

– MuseScore 3 (free) – Super niche app, I know. If you happen to compose orchestral music for it to be played by others, then this app is awesome for writing music sheet. Not to be confused with a DAW like FL Studio or Ableton which allows to create pretty much any kind of music, but isn't specialized into rendering the midi keys into a music sheet.

– Lively Weather (free) – In my opinion the most beautiful, modern-looking weather app on Windows. Very eye-candy.

Productivity & Utilities

– ByteStream Torrent (free) – Underrated torrent app in my opinion. I replaced qBittorrent by this one two years ago and I'm super happy. It works as well as qBittorrent, but looks way more modern. A visually eye-candy app again. It has less features than qBittorrent, but for the rare usage I have of torrents, this one is plenty enough for me!

– Handbrake (free) – Probably not the most user-friendly, but free and powerful and local video and audio converter / encoder. I used this when I needed to compress some old family videos (~50GB down to just 5GB without loss of quality, using appropriate settings) rather than trying to upload 50GB of video on a random website.

– Snipping Tools (free) – Yes, I will recommend a built-in app in Windows. It's simply amazing and I find Microsoft greatly improved it the past few years. Try Win+Shift+S. On the latest update, you can now annotate on the screen directly without first taking a screenshot and then editing it.

– Ambie (freemium) – Great app for some relaxing background music or noise. It comes with some sort of pomodoro, which makes it more interesting than just playing some YouTube video in background.

Coding & Development

– Visual Studio (freemium) & Visual Studio Code (free) with GitHub Copilot (free or subscription) – Yes, sorry, I can't live without AI anymore.

– Godot (free) – Probably the most beginner friendly game engine that also allows to make complete, high-quality games.

– DB Browser (free) – Awesome to explore a local SQLite database.

– Character Map UWP (free) – Much better and more advanced app for exploring fonts than Character Map or Settings.

Personalization

– WinToys (free) – Allows to do some quick maintenance and optimization of Windows. I mainly used it on a very old Surface Pro 1 (2013) which starts struggling.