Best Windows apps this week
One-hundred and ninety-two in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps, games and extensions released for Windows 8.x and Windows 10 in the past seven days.
The Windows 10 Anniversary Update is out. Check out Wayne's overview of what is new, and this helpful tip to free up disk space after upgrading and making sure everything works as intended.
As always, if I missed an app or game that has been released this week that you believe is particularly good, let me know in the comments below or notify me via email instead.
Discounts this week
The following apps and games are discounted by at least 50 percent this week:
- Media Player Gold, a multimedia player for $6.99
- 8 Zip, a compression app for $0.99
- Nextgen Reader, RSS feed reader for $2.49
- Recording Studio Pro, music app for $4.99
- ScreenShot Tool Pro, screenshot taking app for
- Daily Budget Planner, personal finance app for $4.99
- Total Manager Pro, a file manager for $4.99
- DjVu PDF Viewer, reader for PDF and DjVu documents, for $1.49
- Video to Audio Converter, for $5.99
- DigitalArtist, a PDF editor and graphics package for $6.50
App of the week
Photo Scan is a free OCR application for Windows that extracts text from pictures using an easy to use process.
Basically, all you do is point the app to a photo on the local system to have all text extracted from the image.
You may then copy part or all of the text, or process it in other ways, for instance by having it read to you aloud.
Photo Scan worked really well during tests. While you may experience an occasional hiccup, it is usually nothing that a quick manual editing cannot fix.
Other apps
Graven: The Moon Prophecy HD is an adventure / puzzle game in which you try to stop a secret order from releasing an ancient evil.
The game plays like your typical "find in picture" types of games with puzzle elements.
You move from screen to screen collecting items on the floor, and solving little puzzles that keep you from advancing.
Visuals are excellent, and if you like this type of adventure game, you will surely like Graven as well.
Hopic Explorer is a free WebDAV client for Windows 10 that allows you to connect to any WebDAV server to manage data.
Use it to stream music or video, manage files, upload new files, delete old files and more.
The app supports Continuum and Windows Hello.
Nonogram2 is a classic nonogram (picross) type of puzzle game in which cells in a grid need to be painted or left blank based on numbers displayed on the side.
A clue of 4 indicates for example that four cells need to be colored in a row or column, while the remaining cells remain blank.
Qello Concerts is a subscription-based service offering access to concerts and music documentaries. It is the world's largest collection of full-length HD concerts according to Qello, spanning from the 1920s to the present and covering a wide spectrum of music genres.
Non-subscribers can click on "maybe later" on the start screen to get a sneak peek of what is offered inside without signing up for the 7-day free trial or a paid account.
SeeSo is a US-only entertainment application by NBC that concentrates on comedy.
Watch original classics, British comedy, stand-up comedy, NBC originals and more using the application.
A 30-day free trial account is available for users from the US, afterwards it is $3.99 per month.
Wallhaven Alpha is a wallpaper application that taps into Wallhaven's vast collection of desktop wallpapers.
Browse wallpapers or use search to find them. You may either save the background images to the local disk, or set them directly as desktop or lockscreen wallpaper images.
Besides doing that, you may also enable agents to update the lock screen or desktop wallpaper in intervals using random wallpapers.
Notable updates
Excel Mobile spreadsheets can be exported to the OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods) format.
Groove Music supports the editing of metadata of locally stored music.
Word Mobile documents can be exported to the OpenDocument Text (.odt) format.