An Arm and a Windows

A few weeks ago over at Shiny Surface I saw a post titled, "A better way to find great Windows Store apps."  The title sounded promising to say the least. The Windows Store is not only underpopulated, as someone who'd gotten used to Google Play I missed seeing what other users downloaded after viewing a certain app, as well as apps that were related to the app that I was looking at.

The Great Windows App site that the SS post was about ended up being something like what I was looking for. The site uses an automated process to remove obviously poor apps.

1. First the process excludes any apps that use the default Windows Store icon (a sign that the developer was too lazy to even design their own custom icon or company logo). 
2. Second, they exclude any app that chooses both a dark font and tile since no one in their right mind would create such a hard to read tile. 
3. Third, they exclude any app that has a live tile designed in MS Paint...both because installing such an app would make your home screen look terrible, as well as the fact that such poor effort at presentation (are we sensing a theme here?) probably indicates a poor app as well. 
4. Finally, a really short app description is also grounds for automatic exclusion as any developer who really cared about their app and wanted people to use it would do their best to put their heart into a helpful description. 
5. After doing all that, the site then uses a couple of other filters to weed out any other terrible apps that might have passed the first four automatic excluders. 

I'd have to say it's a pretty ingenious concept. Perhaps the only thing I don't like is the heavy emphasis on tile design. On Google Play, especially in the earlier Android 1.5 years some of the greatest apps had the crudest icons. I have less of a problem with their focus on English, though I think that could lead to some incredible apps being missed. Kakao Talk, for example, is a Korean developed app. If users had had to wait for it to get a full English description they'd have missed out for awhile on one of Android's most useful and popular apps.

The site hasn't led me to any incredible apps yet, but I made it my homepage on IE10 with the thought that I'll check it pretty regularly whenever I'm hunting for a new app.

All in all it's a must-have bookmark/IE pin for any Windows RT user.