We're only a couple of weeks away from the big Anniversary Update hitting the Windows 10 family across the board, which includes the Xbox One console. Preview members have been seeing little snippets of what's to come, but right now the latest build gives access to MSN Weather, Microsoft's own app that is now universal across phones, PCs and the console.
It's probably not the first app you might want in your living room, but what it does right now is give us an early look at how a Universal App will translate across the big(ger) screen.
For the most part it's exactly what you'd expect.
In some cases there will be user interface tweaks that need to be made in order to adapt an application for the TV. Aside from everything looking generally larger than it does on the PC, MSN Weather is the exact same app you're familiar with from the other Windows 10 versions. Well, almost. There doesn't seem to be the "News" section present on the console, but that's about all that seems to be missing so far. The 'hamburger' menu completely disappears on the console, too, meaning you have to slide it out fully to access the other sections of the app.
Navigating is fairly straight forward. Moving around will auto-select elements within the UI, though when you're looking at a map that then switches to being an on-screen cursor. Locking on to your location seems to yield mixed results. We've had both very fast and accurate pin-pointing of the city we're in and results saying we're in France. And since it hooks in to your Microsoft account, so long as you're signed in on other devices your favorite locations will be synced across them.
One thing that would be nice down the road, is if Microsoft made this an app that can be snapped. Reducing to the phone UI at the side of the screen would be pretty useful for quickly checking the forecast while you're doing something else.
The app itself isn't that exciting, but it is fairly slick and so far, problem free. The bigger picture is what it means for the future, and it really does look like current Windows 10 apps will scale up to the Xbox One just fine. We're not developers, so we can't say how easy it is or isn't. But this here is just a taster and it's got us ready and waiting for an onslaught of apps to come.
Check out some more images below. If you're on the preview program you can head into the Store and download it right now to check out yourselves.
