dashboard

Starting late last night, Alpha members of Xbox’ Insider Program are receiving an update that significantly overhauls the Xbox One dashboard once again.

Implementing “Fluent Design”, Microsoft’s new design language …
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Custom gamerpics are currently being tested for use on Xbox according to a Reddit post by Major Nelson. The new feature is currently available to Alpha build members of the …
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The Xbox One is to get a completely redesigned user interface this fall. Microsoft are making some big changes to the overall design to ensure that gamers have a …
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On a recent edition of The Inner Circle podcast, Xbox boss Phil Spencer dished on some of the features he’s seen floating around the office. As Phil says, “I …
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For anyone who has spent significant amounts of time with the Xbox One, it’s clear the user interface was designed with a Kinect in mind. In light of the …
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Xbox has released a suite of new applications for the Xbox dashboard, confirms Major Nelson.  Not all apps are available in all Xbox LIVE regions.

In time …
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Microsoft has started gradually deploying its fall 2012 Xbox 360 dashboard update, according to Major Nelson. In order to “ensure a stable release,” the update will be doled out in waves, with 3 million Xbox 360 owners getting in on the first wave of updates. “Additional users” will receive the update at some point during the next couple of weeks. It isn’t completely clear at this point whether or not the interesting choice of words by the Xbox Live director of programming means all users will get the update within two weeks. He did, however, request that those who don’t get in on the update right away remain calm and “just keep checking back in.”

In any case, 360 owners can expect a multitude of new features and some tweaks to existing dashboard elements. Following is the full list of changes straight from Major Nelson’s blog:

• Refreshed Xbox 360 Dashboard. We’ve updated the UI with a few things, including an updated layout with more tiles, a combined TV & Movies channel and, in the US, a Sports destination.
• Internet Explorer for Xbox. With Internet Explorer on Xbox, you can easily find and view internet content on the biggest screen in the house, including HTML5 videos.
• Recommendations and Ratings. Recommendations will allow you to discover new favorites, generated based on a number of variables including the content you previously viewed, what your friends are consuming and what is most relevant and popular with our Xbox community. You can now rate content yourself and also see Rotten Tomatoes ratings.
• Pinning. Pinning lets you personalize the dashboard by saving your favorite movies, TV shows, games, music, videos and websites right to the home screen. It’s as easy as opening an app or a favorite movie and clicking “pin.”
• Xbox Video. Formerly called Zune Video Marketplace, Xbox Video offers hundreds of thousands of TV shows and movies for buying or renting in instant HD streaming.
  Recent. Previously called Quick Play, the Recent view gives you a list of movies, games, apps or other types of content that you most recently accessed on the console.
• Enhanced Search. The last Xbox LIVE update brought Bing voice search to Xbox so you could use voice to search for movies, TV shows, actors, directors and artists. This year we added genre search to the list, so now you can search for action, comedy, romance, drama or sci-fi. Bing voice search now includes results for video across the Web, including YouTube.
• International Expansion of Voice Search. We’ve expanded our Kinect voice search capabilities to 9 new countries – Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Italy, Spain, Austria, and Ireland.

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Some of you may have signed on to Xbox Live recently and received a prompt for an update. This is a behind-the-scenes update, containing improvements on existing features and foundations …
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Microsoft has lined up lots of new features that will appear in upcoming updates, some big and some small. No doubt the biggest announcement is the one that confirms …
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Xbox owners who choose to stream Comcast Xfinity On Demand to their consoles once the service launches won’t have to worry about the data adding up towards their 250-gigabyte bandwidth caps, according to a Comcast FAQ. The reasoning is that “since the content is being delivered over our private IP network and not the public Internet, it does not count against a customer’s bandwidth cap,” reads the FAQ.

Users will thus be able to stream all the on-demand national broadcasts, premium channel programming and free videos they please once the Xfinity service makes its way to Microsoft’s console. They will not, however, gain the ability to watch live TV on their 360s. Furthermore, Comcast currently has no plans “at this time” to offer live TV streaming at any future date. What Xbox 360 owners will be able to do is take advantage of Kinect and the dashboard’s search function when they’re looking to enjoy a little HBO Go or other compatible programming.

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