Since i'm quite bored, i'll list out some apps which I find useful with snippets about the "why":
1. Twitter apps:
The
official twitter app is great if you're a casual user and use twitter more for posting as compared to reading/catching up.
The liquid daffodil apps (
gleek,
cowlick, etc.) do have the features on par with the windows phone versions but the interface is not to my liking and it doesnt seem to refresh a whole load of tweets in the background for catching up.
Tweetro+ hits the sweet spot for me with the interface which has one of the better portrait orientation look out there. The tweetmarker support is great and tends to work flawlessly. You have to pay to unlock more than 2 accounts though.
Apart from these i've tried out
Tweetium, which I never really considered until recently due to the gradients in the interface when I tried it out ages ago. But now they have a flatter option so I bought it. Now while the app looks and functions very well, several extra abilities such as tweetmarker support are behind a 6 months worth of subscription fee of sorts. It was quite a steep price for me, so I have abstained from buying the subscription, but otherwise its a great looking, functional app.
Rowi and metrotwit(now dead) arent really that good to be honest so i'll not talk about them.
Metrotube is one of the first apps i'd tried since i'd used it on my windows phone a lot. It looks and functions great unsurprisingly.
Apart from this, i've also tried out
primetube but the interface and functionality for that seems a bit lackluster and basic apart from way the youtube comments are laid out.
But the app which got me to switch to metro for youtube rather than using the browser for it was
Hyper, which has a great looking interface, with the ability to download videos and to play them in the background.
3. Music/audio apps
outcoldplayer (formerly gMusicW) is a godsend for me on my Surface Pro 2 since it has a limited amount of space to store a lot of my music. It looks great and the last.fm scrobbling, playlist/queuing features are really convenient.
As a spotify user,
spotlite is a great app to navigate spotify on a tablet. It also has last.fm scrobbling which sometimes doesnt work.
I've struggled to find a competent podcast player on the store with opml importing and synching across devices but it doesnt exist as of now. I have settled on using
PODCASTS! though, and though it did sync my subscriptions across computers, there was no mention of it on the description so ymmv.
Podscout does seem like an extremely feature rich player, though it seems a bit steep to me.
4. Video apps
If you want mass consumption of popular media, then
videosnacker is a good solution. I have uninstalled this app because I wasnt a fan of the content, though the app is competent enough.
If you're into the whole vine thing,
primevine is quite good. The interface is very nice, and I dont think any other app on the store comes close to the app in functionality.
Giant bomb video thing is an app about a site about video games. You can get HD videos and subscriber content by connecting the app to the website, and the app remembers your position on the the videos and podcasts. Podcasts also play in the background.
For twitch there are relatively recent apps called
8stream and
game streams which are kinda basic in their current forms.
I don't use xbox video, and netflix works as it should.
Flipboard is the standard experience you'd expect from them.
Of all the RSS/News readers on the store, i've settled on
Readiy Pro which has a great interface and can parse articles using a host of services. It also has pocket support which is key for me. Speaking of pocket,
Latermark is a great app. You can use the share charm on any app to save to pocket via latermark.
For ebook reading there aren't many great looking apps, but
Book bazaar reader is a highly functional app with all the features you would expect from an ebook reader. It does have ads though. Also it seems like the only app which will accept mobi format files competently.
If you want to read epub formats, cbr formats or pdf ebooks, then
Cover is worth a try. It is a good looking, funcational app, but it requires a payment to make more than a certain amount of books readable. Dont know if its worth it, but I did make the payment and it seems worth it. Hopefully more features are added later.
For comic books, I found
Komic reader to be great since it has a great portrait interface and it also has a lot of options to tinker with.
I tend to annotate PDFs a lot and since I cant really pay the huge amounts it costs for professional tools on the desktop side, I tried out
Drawboard PDF which works out well with the stylus most of the times. It used to crash a lot previously but the dev is actively pushing out updates and now its relatively stable.
There's also the kindle app which is fairly substandard but you can read your amazon walled garden.
6. Reddit apps
There are a whole load of reddit apps on the store so it makes for an exciting sift through the chaff to find the good ones. Depending on how you tend to use reddit, there's a bunch of options.
If you're more picture oriented rather than text or video, then
Reddit8 is the best looking app. You can scroll between posts and it makes best use of the screen real estate on landscape mode. It really is a good looking app, though I do wish it had a dark skin option. Another option for scrolling between picture posts is
Reddit! and although the interface doesn't look that good, gifs look really good on this app.
For more general purpose text reading, and videos
Reddhub is great and is pretty close to the website experience, but with a lot more features to mess with. Similarly, Reddit to go!(seems to be down from the store momentarily) is great for text and videos.
Reddit with redditing provides a good balance of picture and comments on a post by structuring posts in a split screen on click through so that both the comments and the post itself are visible. Also handles imgur albums and switching between posts quite well.
Used to use
My study life to keep track of uni stuff, and it really worked well. Plus it looks quite slick. Caveat: you have to sign up to their website to use the app.
Timemanage.me is a basic yet somewhat customizable pomodoro timer which works as it should.
