Here are some of the best apps for your new Windows 10 PC

If you just got a new Windows 10 PC for Christmas or moving from a Mac, you’re probably looking for some useful apps to install on your shiny new computer. Windows has a lot of apps, ranging from the classic Win32 apps to the modern Universal Windows Platform apps. There are a ton of great apps out there for Windows 10, but here are some of the best and most useful ones:

Paint.net

Paint.net is one of the first apps I install on my PC every time I do a clean install. It’s a fast and lightweight photo editor that includes almost all of the basic photo editing features. It obviously isn’t as powerful as something like Adobe Photoshop, but it has all of the basic things you might need and you can pretty much consider this as a lite version of Photoshop that’s available for free. Additionally, if you have been using Paint only on your Windows PC to edit photos, Paint.net is definitely a huge upgrade since it has support for layers, plugins, and much more.

You can get Paint.net from here for free.

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ShareX

ShareX is a really useful screenshot tool for Windows. If you are a Mac user switching to Windows 10, you will really love this feature as it essentially adds a CMD+Shift+4 alternative to Windows 10. And if you are already a Windows user using the Snipping Tool or just the PrntScn button, ShareX is a much better alternative. That’s because ShareX lets you screenshot a certain part of your desktop, and it automatically saves it to a specific destination (which you can configure). Additionally, you can also set ShareX to automatically upload screenshots to Imgur which is another neat feature. More importantly, ShareX automatically copies the screenshot to your clipboard which means you can easily paste it into services like Twitter, Skype, or any other service that lets you paste images from the clipboard.

ShareX is a free app, and you can get it from here.

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Nextgen Reader

Nextgen Reader is a great Universal Windows App for Windows 10 devices that integrates with Feedly. It’s a great app to stay up-to-date with all the news around the world. As Nextgen Reader integrates with Feedly, you already have access to all the feeds you are subscribed to on Feedly if you happen to be using Feedly already. Nextgen Reader presents all the articles in a simple user interface which looks pretty good and offers a handful of customization features. The app also takes advantage of Windows 10’s Start Menu by showing some of the latest articles on its live tile which is also neat.

Nextgen Reader is available for $4.99 from the Windows Store.

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Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is an open-sourced code editor that can be used as a very good alternative to Notepad. Visual Studio Code comes with a lot of powerful features, including support for extensions which will allow you to add a lot of other features to the app. Visual Studio Code comes with Git integrated, which is a key feature if you are a developer.

But if you are not a developer, you can still use Visual Studio Code to edit text files or markdown files as a Notepad alternative. You can also customize most part of the app’s look, which is also fairly nice. To put it simply, Visual Studio Code is a powerful version of Notepad if you are looking for a simple text editor.

You can get Visual Studio Code for free here.

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Todoist

And lastly, there is Todoist — a beautiful and powerful to-do list app for Windows 10. The app lets you create to-do lists for certain projects, or you can simply make to-do lists for your everyday tasks. The app also has a new Smart Schedule feature which lets you find the best due date for a certain task based on your other tasks, data from similar tasks, and much more. The Windows 10 app for Todoist has a simple user interface and it’s also available on Windows 10 Mobile. Additionally, Todoist also has apps for Android, iOS, and the Web.

You can get Todoist from the Windows Store here. 

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Others

Here’s a quick list of some of the other useful apps for Windows:

• ScreenToGif
• Wunderlist
• Spotify
• Google Chrome
• Newsflow
• MSPoweruser
• Grover Pro
• Tweeten
• Netflix
• Dropbox

These apps are my picks for some of the best apps on Windows 10 and apps that I use almost everyday. As I said, there are a lot of apps available for Windows and you probably prefer something else. But if you are just getting started, the apps mentioned above are probably the best out there.