Free

There’s no Vine for Windows 8 yet, but Vyclone(Opens in a new window) offers a similar social video experience—without the 6-second limit! Vyclone is already available on iPhone and Android, so you don’t have to worry about a lack of content and potential contacts. As with all these social apps, you can follow, heart, and comment on videos submitted to the service. You can also watch nearby footage, but where Vyclone really shines is when you have multiple people shooting the same event: The service edits the disparate angles together.

$1.99

Speed through wintry mountain highways and charming European villages in this visually stunning driving game. Your whole tablet is your steering wheel, and your thumbs are your accelerator and brake pedals. You can choose from 47 car models and 9 locations, from Fiat to Lamborghini, Venice to Nevada. As Asphalt 8: Airborne(Opens in a new window)‘s name indicates, you can even get airborne and perform gravity defying stunts, although actual gravity is convincingly reproduced with fine-tuned physics. It’s a lot of game for less that 2 bucks!

Free, with in-app purchases

This without a doubt fits in the “cool” category. Hold your tablet up and move it around, and Star Chart(Opens in a new window) will show you what lies off in the heavens before you. Tap on any celestial body to see a sidebar informing you of its distance, brightness, and other characteristics. You can also use the app to explore planets, constellations, major stars, satellites, messier objects, and comets. In app purchases give you more stars, dwarf planets, moons, and more.

Here’s something you won’t find in the iPad app store: A bittorrent client. As we often state, PCMag does not condone the downloading of pirated content, but we’re also aware that there are legitimate file-sharing uses for the peer-to-peer protocol. There are Windows 8.1 apps like uTorrent and BitTorrent that perform ancillary BitTorrent functions, but Torrex Lite(Opens in a new window) actually lets you upload and download using magnet links; the Pro version ($7.99) adds background downloading and can stream content as it downloads.

Free

Flipboard(Opens in a new window) will be very familiar to many an iPad user. The magazine-like interface collects topic-based news stories from around the Web, and as its name suggests, lets you flip through their pages. You can easily create an account with your Facebook login or the more laborious way with an email address. Choose topic sections for your custom magazine or just flip through what Flipboard thinks you’ll like. You can even listen to music inside the app, but sometimes the swiping gesture used to flip calls up the Windows 8.1 Charms.

Free

If you’re running Windows 8 on a touch tablet, there’s no better demonstration of the cool types of things you can do with multitouch than Fresh Paint(Opens in a new window). Five simultaneous fingers are supported, and you can actually mix new colors on a virtual palette. If you’d rather not start with a blank canvas, “packs” of line drawings and cartoons can get you started. The Fun Pack is free, but the more artistic Variety Pack is a $1.49 in-app purchase, and the Adventure Pack, with its 24 character sketches and Friends Pack of mostly pets cost $1.99 each.

Of course, you can just start finger or mouse painting on a blank page or a photo of your own, with a good variety of brush and pencil tips. You also choose among a dozen canvas and paper textures. Once you’re done, you can export your masterpiece to a PNG file, or even use the Share charm to send it to any apps that can share to email, social networks, and more. This is a surprisingly polished app, but it’s one that’s been around since the early days of Windows 8 prereleases. What’s most impressive is that the paint is just so real looking.

I was originally planning to include Evernote(Opens in a new window) here, but while that service’s Windows 8 app does let you view, tag, search, and add notes, it’s pretty primitive compared with the OneNote(Opens in a new window) Windows 8 app. Unlike the rest of Microsoft Office , OneNote is not a desktop application, but instead offers apps for iOS, Android, Mac, and PC, and Windows Phone, so you’re covered when it comes to devices. An insertion wheel lets you add a table, tag, photo, list, or paste to your note. I use this app to take notes at all my vendor meetings, and since I log into the same Microsoft account as on my Windows 8 machine, all my notes were available. I could even play my recording of the meetings, but playback wasn’t linked to text as it is in the desktop version.

Publisher: GPS Tuner Kit
Though health and fitness-related, this is among the coolest Windows 8.1 apps around. BallStrike(Opens in a new window) uses your webcam in a sort of augmented reality setup in which you hit balls on the screen. It’s almost like having a Kinect without having to buy one: The camera tracks your motion, and a “heat map” style image of you shows up on your screen as you swat at the on-screen balls. Not only will this impress you with the technology used, but may even help shed away some extra pounds.

$9.99

CyberLink’s video editing software has long garnered top ratings here at PCMag, and the company has brought some of its expertise over to Windows 8.1. YouCam Mobile(Opens in a new window) lets you manipulate both photos and video even while you’re still shooting. You can crop, tag faces, frame, draw on top of your images, and stamp photos with stock art like flowers and kissy lips. On top of its photo features, YouCam lets you trim video, and then upload it to YouTube or Facebook.

Free

Another app we loved on iOS arrives for Windows 8. Use TuneIn Radio(Opens in a new window) to play any Web-streamed radio broadcast on earth. It can find local radio station, has a sleep timer, and can keep playing in the background while you do other things with your PC. Stream categories include local radio, music, sports, news, and talk. And you can search by other locations or find and play podcasts. I only wish the app let me choose a bit rate for stations that offered several, like those from SomaFM, but it shares that limitation with its iOS version. The latter still has a bunch more features, such as the ability to record and favorite what you’re listening to.

$6.99

Halo has long been one of the legends of first-person shooter video games, and PCMag’s Samara Lynn thought well enough of this sequel to award it a 4 out of 5 rating. You don’t need to have ever played the game’s previous versions to enjoy Halo: Spartan Assault(Opens in a new window). Its gorgeous graphics and fun, touch-based gameplay will draw you in. The music is quite impressive, too, not the typical low-budget canned electro stuff. You do have to buy credits if you want certain weapons and armament upgrades. Weekly and mission-specific challenges keep the game fresh, but it can be tricky to master the shooting and moving gestures.

Publisher: Grant Kot
Grantophone is a pretty impressive piece of music software: It’s extremely simple to use, yet powerful in its ability to let you craft tones. You play on a nonstandard 4-octave keyboard of bars, starting with a choice of four waveforms. These you can modify almost infinitely by changing the strength of individual overtones, cutoff, resonance, vibrato, detune, noise, and reverb. The only pity is that the app doesn’t offer a way to record your creations, though you can play over music that’s already playing on your PC, for a “jam” experience. If you’re looking for a more prefab music making app, check out Music Maker Jam.