Now here’s a thing I didn’t realise I wanted: an event calendar on my console. There’s a new(ish) Community Calendar app on the Xbox One that is good and could be great.
Like so many Xbox One things, this is an app you’ll have to download, then load up from the console’s app directory. It was launched to preview members last month and should be rolling out to everyone today at the latest with the rest of the new Xbox dashboard.
The calendar already looks stuffed, because it is full of notices about livestreams, sweepstakes and more.
(Two other calendar categories on the list but not in the shot above — Sweepstakes and Tournaments)
You can filter this, which will be good in the long-term, though it shows that the calendar needs more upkeep before being essential. For example, if we just set it to show new releases, it only seems to know about one upcoming game. Given the flow of low-profile indies and cool big games already slated for release in the weeks and months ahead, they should be able to list more.
If you filter just for free stuff and sweepstakes, you get this, which has handy reminders about when new Games with Gold “free” games are available — those being the Xbox One and backwards-compatible Xbox 360 games you get if you have a paid Xbox Live subscription:
Xbox One and its rival, the PS4, are loaded with livestreaming apps, and you just know people are streaming potentially interesting things all the time. How can anyone keep up? A calendar like this should make it way easier to keep track of streams from developers and gaming experts you care about. The many livestreaming event listings in the calendar should be handy and, if used well, could make the console experience a little more of an appointment-viewing/playing affair.
You can friend hosts of some events and follow Twitch channels. Those will presumably allow alerts to show up for upcoming events in the console’s activity or message feeds, but I don’t see a way to pin events on the calendar, to, say, get the calendar to highlight or remind me about an upcoming livestream or game release that I care about. That would be nice, but this is already a good start.
There are always so many games coming out, so many streams happening and so much else going on in gaming that a console calendar seems awfully handy. It’s a good, no-brainer of an idea.
PS4 PS: For those curious about what Sony’s console does, it has an events calendar, which is far lest robust than what Microsoft is now trying to do. But at least they have the foundation for this, too:
Comments
2 responses to “The Xbox One’s New Calendar App Is Surprisingly Useful”
Does it sync up with my Windows Phone/Windows 10 calendar app? Having those notifications pop-up when I’m playing XBOX would be great. Being able to stream my Windows 10 notifications over to the XBOX One or Windows Phone when I’m AFK would be nice too.
I stumbled across this bookmark today, and thought : cool I’ll grab that when I get home.
Um…but ….nope. They failed again with this UI update.
Don’t get me wrong. This new dashboard setup is much nicer. It’s more intuitive, parties seem to load quicker, and it’s less of a pain to actually invite friends to those parties.
But browsing the store for new games and apps is a fucking circus still. It was perfectly fine on the 360, they need to do a better job of showing off new and recent releases rather than just 3 huge pictures for 3 games on the home page. 3 games which seem to never change too.
You know the last part of game of thrones cane out recently. But if I hadn’t been on reddit i wouldn’t have known it. It was nowhere to be found on the store page, I couldn’t browse recent releases or new, and scroll to it easily. I had to type it into the fucking search bar? Seriously.
Not only that but would it be terribly hard to notify the purchaser of a season pass, that you know, they can collect their goods now , so to speak?
My god. A huge rant which only meant to ask :
I can’t find this community calendar while “browsing” through the apps. I couldn’t find it using the search either. Is it actually available to everyone yet?