Best Windows apps this week
Four-hundred-sixty-nine in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps, games and extensions released for Windows 10 and 11 on the Microsoft Store and elsewhere in the past seven days.
Microsoft has blocked other browsers from setting themselves as the default browser on Windows 10 and 11 without user interaction.
The last development build of Windows 11 of 2021 has been released this week; an ISO image is also available.
As always, if I've 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.
Discounts this week
The following list is a selection of the best deals. Make sure you check out the Store for all offers.
Some apps are discounted for more than one week. Only new apps and games are listed below. Check out the previous post in the series for past offers that may still be valid.
- Affinity Designer, for $38.49
- Grapholite - Diagrams, Flow Charts and Floor Plans Designer, for $19.99
- KVADPhoto+ PRO 2, for $4.99
- Music Maker Plus Windows Store Edition, for $14.99
- Starrea - EPUB Reading & Annotation, for $2.99
New Windows apps and games
Spark Post has been renamed to Adobe Creative Cloud Express. The template-based design application can be used to create stories, posts and ads for social sites such as Instagram or Snapchat, logos, banners, posters, flyers, photo collages, invitations and more.
The application requires the latest version of Microsoft Edge according to the description, but users interested in the service can check it out on Adobe's website as well.
CCleaner, the popular cleaning and optimization app is now available on the Microsoft Store.
The app works exactly as the desktop CCleaner application, featuring quick scans and optimizations as well as advanced tools.
SMPlayer is a free media player that can play many video and audio formats out of the box thanks to built-in codecs. Besides media playback, SMPlayer supports playing YouTube videos directly from its interface, and resume for all media files that you start to watch in the player.
Notable Updates
Bitdefender Antivirus Free will be retired on December 31, 2021.
PowerShell 7.3.0 Preview 1 is now available.