News Bar

If at least a small part of your day involves you getting up to speed on the latest news world-wide, then here’s something that might make you raise your eyebrows, but in a good way. It’s called News Bar and it’s developed by Microsoft. Naturally, it should be quite good, right?

Well, it’s a Windows 10 app that aims to help you stay informed and up to date with the latest happenings from all over the world, and, just like many other Windows 10 apps, it can be downloaded on all Windows 10 devices with nothing more than a few clicks (or taps) from the Microsoft Store.

Well, straight off the bat, News Bar has a lot of things going for it. One of its most impressive features is the fact that it brings to your desktop the latest news from well over 4500 of the world’s most popular journalism platforms. The only other efficient way to bring together so many sources would probably mean relying on a news aggregator app, and we all know, they’re not stylish, and for most people, not exactly convenient either.

The application is also extremely unobtrusive, and well-designed in this particular regard. By default, it lives on the right side of your computer’s screen, however, you can position it on any of the four sides (right, left, top, and bottom) via a quick visit to the Settings section. When you don’t need it, simply minimize it just like a typical Windows app, and it’ll be out of your way (and all your desktop icons will automatically return to their normal position).

Here’s another neat little detail: the app also comes with a useful option that allows you to minimize it and then bring it back in focus after a user-defined time. This makes it remarkably well suited for people who often work in “power-shifts,” and don’t want to be distracted during that period. To make the app as relevant as possible, Microsoft has added an option for localization. You can configure the country you want the news from. Oh, we almost forgot – the app allows you to configure it so that it provides the latest info on your favorite stocks, too.

When it comes to customization, the app doesn’t impress, but it doesn’t disappoint either. Most importantly, you can configure various aspects, including the way the app delivers the news. For instance, you can choose between two visualization options: Text and Image. Simply hover an article to read more information, or just click it to open it in the browser.

Last but not least, News Bar can also follow the system theme (useful and stylish at the same time), and it even has something pretty self-explanatory called Transparent Background. Users with multiple monitors, fear not, Microsoft has thought of this as well.

Obviously, there are a lot of things that could be improved. However, before we discuss them, please note that the app is currently in Beta. This means that it will inevitably become better and better until it reaches its final form.

Right now, the biggest drawback is probably the fact that there is no way of sorting the news by categories. The app also lacks support for notifications when an article is updated. It doesn’t provide you with any way of dismissing any article from the app’s bar, meaning you pretty much have no control over what’s being displayed on the side of your screen.

Ok, now let’s talk about the elephant in the room, New Bar’s biggest “annoyance.” The application forces you to use Microsoft’s Edge browser when opening news, regardless of your system’s default browser. As far as we can tell (at least in this tested version), there is no way of changing that.

While we’re sure that Microsoft will continue to improve News Bar in the future (there’s no timeline for the development features as of yet), as it stands, the app is objectively one of the best of its kind out there. It’s not perfect, but the advantages highly outweigh the disadvantages, and it’s definitely worth trying out.