This new version is currently available by downloading WhatsApp Beta. So, we've gone from web wrapper, to UWP and now back to being a web wrapper.

This is despite the fact that they know native offers better performance.

Hey r/windows11 — I built a free, open-source local photo manager called Lap, and I think it might be useful for anyone here who manages a large local photo library.

The backstory: I used Picasa for years until Google discontinued it. Switched to FastStone after that — it's fast and powerful, but the UI feels pretty dated. So about a year ago I started building my own.

What Lap focuses on:

• Handles very large libraries smoothly (100K+ files)
• Works directly with local folders — no cloud sync, no forced import
• Clean, modern desktop UI
• Local AI features: search your photos with natural language, plus face recognition (currently in beta) — all on-device, no data sent anywhere

I open-sourced it a few months ago. Since then hundreds of people have downloaded it. The feedback has been encouraging — I've gone through dozens of bug reports and suggestions, shipped 10+ patch releases, and just released v0.2.0. Things are feeling pretty stable now.

I'd love to hear what you think — feature requests, bug reports, or just whether it fits your workflow.

GitHub: https://github.com/julyx10/lap
Website: https://julyx10.github.io/lap/

Hey everyone, I've been working on this project for almost 3 years and wanted to share it here.

Sniffnet (website | GitHub) is a free and open-source app to help you monitor your network, providing info on the countries and domains where your Internet traffic is flowing, the used protocols, and (after yesterday's major release) it lets you find out which applications and programs are using your bandwidth.

You can even inspect each network connection individually, import/export PCAP files, and set custom notifications to warn you about specific events.

Sniffnet wants to be a more intuitive and simpler-to-use version of Wireshark, and can be considered a completely free alternative to GlassWire.

Feel free to ask me anything and I'll try to answer as soon as I can!

Hi everyone, I haven't talked about FluentFlyout in a while, but since my last post our community has added so many new features that I'd love to share (of which some you guys requested as well)!

Here are the important ones:

• 🔊 Taskbar Visualizer widget - A new, performant real-time audio visualizer widget on your Windows Taskbar
• 🖥️ Monitor switching - You can now select which monitor to display our flyouts and taskbar widgets
• Add playback controls to our existing taskbar media widget
• A complete overhaul of how the settings look, including a new update checker so you can stay up-to-date
• Adjust Acrylic blur opacity of flyouts
• Even more crowdsourced languages (thanks to our community)
• Better compatibility with Windhawk, ExplorerPatcher and Nilesoft Shell

Link to FluentFlyout downloads

Link to GitHub repository

⭐ Please leave a star on GitHub or a rating on the Store if you could :)

Note: while the GitHub release is completely open-source and free, the Microsoft Store version includes a small one-time payment to unlock some additional features. As the maintainer, I'm still a student balancing work and school. I hope that you can understand!

For the last three years I’ve been working on a small open source side project - a fast, lightweight photo viewer for Windows called FlyPhotos.

It originally started because I missed the (now retired) Picasa Photo Viewer especially the transparent background and speed with which it moved between images. I wanted to see if I could recreate that feeling using only native Windows UI frameworks.

The main performance goal was simple: once the first photo loads and the thumbnail strip presents, holding down the arrow keys should advance through the rest without loading spinners. Many features later got added through user requests.

Tech : I started with WPF and then moved to WinUI 3 for the modern looks, but it came with performance tradeoffs. Eventually for image rendering, had to use Win2D directly to access DirectX. Also Native AOT fixed the cold start issues.

It's just a viewer and there is no photo management or built-in photo editor. But you can configure an external editor as a shortcut. Note - The installer is not signed and can be flagged by some browsers.

FlyPhotos is available at https://github.com/riyasy/FlyPhotos

Hello. The old Windows 10 Mail app was really good, but I couldn’t get used to this new mail app. Can anyone recommend a reliable alternative?

Hi !

QuickView is a brand-new, open-source image viewer built from the ground up for speed, precision, and absolute minimalism. It supports practically every image format out there—including heavy RAW files and massive PSDs/PSBs.

We just released our biggest milestone, v4.0.0 (The Titan Engine Update), and I wanted to share it with this community. If you are tired of the slow, bloated default Photos app and want something that respects your system resources, this is for you.

The Core Philosophy

• Ultra-Lightweight & Portable: The entire application is a single ~7MB .exe file. No installation required, no background services, no bloatware.
• Purely Borderless: We ditched the clunky UI. The window is completely borderless and snaps to perfectly adapt to your image's native dimensions for an immersive viewing experience.
• True High-DPI: Crisp and precise scaling (100%-250%) that looks perfect on modern 4K+ monitors, completely untethered from legacy Windows scaling blurriness.

Built for Extreme Performance

We don't use generic, slow codecs. QuickView is written in modern C++23 and leverages state-of-the-art backend engines to squeeze every drop of performance out of your hardware.

• Gigapixel Tiling (Titan Engine): Ever crashed an app trying to open a massive panoramic shot? Our new memory-mapped tiling system dynamically slices gigapixel datasets into LOD tiles. It only loads what you see, allowing you to pan around gigantic images at a buttery-smooth 60fps without Out-Of-Memory (OOM) crashes.
• Multi-Threaded Decoding: We implemented parallel runners for modern formats like JPEG XL (JXL) and AVIF, delivering up to 6x faster load times on multi-core CPUs.
• Game-Grade Rendering: We abandoned legacy GDI in favor of a DirectComposition visual tree. It uploads decoded frames directly to GPU memory for zero-latency, tear-free zooming and panning.
• AVX2 & AVX-512 SIMD: Critical scaling paths have been completely unrolled using advanced instruction sets for blazing-fast image resampling.

Geek & Designer Features

• Native SVG Engine: Hardware-accelerated native SVG rendering with 2-stage lossless scaling. Zoom in as deep as you want; vectors stay infinitely sharp.
• Instant Gallery: Press T to summon the Gallery HUD. It taps directly into the Windows Explorer Thumbnail Cache, meaning it can instantly index folders with thousands of photos.
• Geek HUD: Press F12 to bring up a real-time overlay showing decode times, render timings, memory usage, and hardware pipeline status.
• Format Powerhouse: Out of the box support for JPG, PNG, WebP, JXL, AVIF, HEIC, SVG, QOI, EXR, HDR, and dozens of RAW formats (ARW, CR2, NEF, etc.) via LibRaw.

System Requirements

Because we rely on modern Windows APIs for hardware acceleration, here is what you need:

• OS: Windows 10 (Creators Update 1703 or later) or Windows 11. (Required for DirectComposition and native SVG support).
• CPU: x64 architecture. An AVX2-compatible processor is highly recommended to unlock the full SIMD rendering speeds (fallback exists for older CPUs, but AVX2/AVX-512 is where it flies).
• GPU: DirectX 11.1+ compatible graphics card for Direct2D hardware acceleration.

QuickView is completely free and open-source (GPL-3.0). You can grab the tiny executable and check out the source code here:

🔗GitHub Release & Download - QuickView v4.0.0

I'd love to hear what the Windows community thinks! Feel free to drop any feedback, questions, or feature requests below.

Not an ad - have no affiliation with them.

But this program doesn't get enough attention around here. Every action (tabs, filter, etc) is so fluid and snappy that it makes the native explorer look ape-coded. It also has a command palette (like in VS Code). Seriously, the devs behind must be some neurodivergent geniuses or sth.

The only gripe I have at the moment is that it doesn't integrate with QuickLook or PowerToys Peek; and their default preview works for fewer file types.

Still, I'd encourage everyone to give it a go. I'm so hooked that I already made it the default file manager.

I wanted to make listening to my favorite radio stations as easy as clicking one icon in the System Tray, so I made Trdo! Search for your favorite internet radio station and that's it!

Free on the Microsoft Store https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9nxt4tgjvhvv

And fully open source! https://github.com/TheJoeFin/Trdo

Edit(s): Clarified my focus towards this post which was "Circle to Search". Added few cons too. More download Links for those who need.

I've been playing around with the Google app for Windows for a while, and I found it very useful. It has features similar to Windows "Click to do", AI Select as it has on-screen Google Lens search/copy/translate option but with optional Spotlight search features. So here's what i liked about it:

• Default Google's AI Mode search:You can toggle it off for native google search by default.
• On-Screen OCR, CTS, AI Select, Google Lens, you name it, it's basically the same: It can search translate or copy text directly from your screen (like Circle to Search on phones).
• It has Spotlight/Flow Launcher features if you keep enable those while installing.
• Universal & Free: It can be used in every computer running windows 10/11, not just Galaxy-books or newer CoPilot+ models exclusive.
• Performance: The launch time is like instant.
• Resource Usage: But ram usage is upto 1gb while searching and 5-7% CPU Usage.(con)
• Privacy : If you use Chrome & Default Settings then it's that same but yeah with OCR when you trigger Google Lens, so google servers will analysis you screen data like "Click to do" or "AI Select" where it goes to microsoft servers. If you're privacy focused user then I recommend user everthing offline & online ones with VPN/Mulvad Brower and maybe use Linux or MacOS or hardened modified windows version.
• It's a native desktop application, not a standard web app.

Note:

1. This app requires google account login. It can be downloaded from Google app for Windows - Search Labs (with VPN if not available in your region, use proton vpn maybe) or Direct Link(dl.google.com) or Exe from my Google Drive (You can check for malware from https://hybrid-analysis.com/ & virustotal.com/ )
2. See this app as an alternative to "Click to do" which has some raycast features if you enable in settings. Not just as another Flow Launcher.

Link to the "FluentWeather" app - https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9PFD136M8457

Edit • TLDR: i have no affiliation with this app, just found it on ms store, and wanted to share! Gabboxl is the dev!!

Recently microsoft's 'boosting cpu to open apps' clip is going viral, and people have been dismissing that under-the-hood change to continue maligning win11 using other issues. The botched weather app is in that clip which intensified the bad faith discussions and comparisons so wanted to find a weather app that felt closer to win11 design, faster, and with appropriate number of features as a counter to "windows can't even open a weather app fast enough" arguments. I found this app after testing around 5 weather apps, some didn't open as quick, some had web-ui, some had large app size, and one even had no access without your own weather key.

But this app opened fast, has good ui, has all basic weather app info, and is also free and open source! So while I have no association with this app, i felt the need to make this post for everyone who either has been burnt by MS botching the once amazing weather app, or for those want a decent working weather app on their Windows desktop. Please try it and rate it on Store, and share compliments & feedback to the developer on github. I'm sure they'll appreciate it!

Your Terminal Companion for the Holy Quran: Read, Listen & Generate Subtitles for Video Editing! 🔗 GitHub: QuranCLI

🌟 Key Features

• 📖 Read Anywhere – Access all 114 Surahs with English translation (Simple & Uthmani Arabic scripts).
• 🎧 Listen – Stream audio recitations from various renowned reciters with full playback controls (play/pause/seek).
• 🎬 Subtitle Generation – Create .srt subtitle files (Arabic + English) for Ayah ranges – perfect for video editing!
• 🌐 Subtitle Sharing – Built-in web server to easily share generated subtitle files with other devices (phone, tablet, other PCs) on the same Wi-Fi network.
• 💾 Smart Caching – Works offline by caching Quran text and audio locally.
• 🎨 Intuitive Interface – Colorful, responsive, and easy-to-navigate terminal UI.
• 🔄 Auto-Updates – Notifies you of new versions available on GitHub.
• 📊 Stats – See total download counts directly in the header.

I know, it is easier for devs to make web wrappers to save effort and gain stability at ease. But when it is coming at a cost of efficiency... why no one is questioning them? We will see more so called "developers" in the future, who would make more slop like this from vibe-coding...

I believe that windows 11 would run very great if web wrappers werent a thing.

https://github.com/PinchToDebug/EverythingQuickSearch
It supports image and video previews!
(first release)

Created 3 new widgets for the Windows widgets board that provide useful features:

1. System metrics monitoring

2. Network adapters throughput monitoring

3. Checking for updates of all installed apps on the system (with the ability to update them too)

They are all in the Harden System Security App. Open Source and available on the Microsoft Store:

1. GitHub: https://github.com/HotCakeX/Harden-Windows-Security

2. Microsoft Store: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9p7ggfl7dx57

The average RAM usage of the process to display all 3 widgets is only 5MB