Stop Hating Apps, Because Now They Can Live Happily on Your Desktop

What’s that?  You hate apps?  I’m willing to bet that if you could only share a Windows 8 App’s workspace with the rest of your desktop, you’d actually find that many of them can be quite useful.  Well, stop dreaming about that day, because it’s here.

The solution: ModernMix by Stardock (http://www.stardock.com/products/modernmix/).

Yes, now you can launch apps, play games, share that experience with the rest of your desktop, and basically do everything you’d actually like to be able to do with Windows 8, that until now, you’ve been stuck hating.

Take a look below, as you can see, I’ve got my whole desktop open (with a maximized browser in the background – FireFox), and two windows 8 apps open (Google, and MS Mahjong).  The windows are resizable, can be minimized and maximized (just like normal desktop applications), and basically operate just like any other desktop application otherwise would.

As you can see from the taskbar (above), you can even have the app icon show up on the taskbar container for an app (yes, pinning works too).

You can easily toggle between “app mode” and “desktop mode” by simply going into the overlay in the top right, and changing the setting (see below).

There are two downsides to this presently.  One is, it’s still in Beta, so it’s not officially version 1.0 yet.  And secondly, the app is paid ($4.99), but I think it’s well worth it at such a low price.  There’s a 30 day trial available, and that’s what I’m taking advantage of right now. 

At this point, day 2 of my trial, I can already tell this is going to be worth it.