The Microsoft News team works year-round to make delivering the news from our 1,200 partners (which represent about 4,500 brands) fast, seamless, and relevant. Improvements often come from your feedback, such as the ability to hide stories from publishers you were not interested in on the Microsoft News App on Windows 10. We’re excited to alert you to more App updates to follow your interests, find video more easily and – the most important daily habit of all – check the weather.
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1. Pin Topics on Start Live Tiles
The Microsoft News app on Windows 10 now supports secondary Live Tiles.
From your feedback as well as activation data, we know that Live Tiles are a particularly handy feature to track breaking news throughout the day. The latest update lets you follow specific topics, so that you can keep abreast of developing reports in your industry and track your favorite interests — right from your Start menu.
Pin any topic of interest to your Start menu as a Live Tile in just two easy steps:
- Go to the topic page in the News app and tap on ‘Pin’ at the top
- In the pop-up window, tap ‘Yes’ to pin the topic to your Start menu
That’s it! You will now have the pinned topic as a Live Tile on your Start menu.
Have a lot of categories to track? Match the Live Tiles to your preferred Start menu’s layout: Simply right-click on the Live Tile, choose ‘Resize’ and select from the drop-down menu’s four viewing options.
Users in most regions can search for any custom topic in the News app and pin it to Start to monitor updates. Whether you are interested in astronomy, personal finance, or your local sports team, just search in the News App and pin the topic to Start.
2. Watch More on the Video Hub
Watch our collection of videos in a new experience: The Video Hub brings together our videos in a single location within the News app for easy browsing.
You can access the Video Hub via the side navigation pane. (Note: The Video Hub is currently only available in certain editions of the app.)
The Video Hub also supports auto-play and custom video queues. Browse through the category feeds and create a watch list.
- Tap the ellipses “…” on any video card to bring up the options menu
- Choose “Add video to queue”
We have also added a new mini player for the Video Hub with support for picture-in-picture mode. Now you can switch to the mini player and continue watching videos while multitasking!
Just tap on the ‘Switch to mini player’ button in the video player to enable this mode. You can drag and position the mini player to any part of your desktop.
To switch back, simply tap on the “Switch to standard player’ button.
3. Be Prepared with the Weather Card
Do you need to bring your umbrella or swap out your sweats for your shorts? Save yourself a few clicks by adding the new Weather card to the ‘My News’ feed in the app. Get the forecast right in your News app — and get the forecast right.
Want to change the location or modify the temperature units? Simply tap the ellipses “…” on the card for more options.
4. Coming up: Compact Stories (Beta)
Coming up, the News app will be moving to new Compact Stories module so that you can take in the headlines, trending topics and top stories at a glance. This feature is in a limited preview (beta) and available to certain customers.
We’re excited to bring you these updates to the Microsoft News App on Windows 10. As always, we value your feedback. Try them out and send any comments — and more feature suggestions — through the Feedback Hub.
