Larry “Major Nelson” Hyrb has heralded the arrival of the October 2014 system update for the Xbox One, introducing a variety of improvements to take advantage of the console’s multitasking capabilities with Snap.
Double-tapping the Xbox button will now bring up a menu that lets you select, open, and close apps to run alongside your game in snap mode. Friends and Messages apps have been newly optimized to run in snap mode, allowing you to see who’s online and send messages in threaded conversations, all without leaving whatever you’re doing. Achievements can now be shared from snap mode with captions, letting you brag to your friends about just how hard you worked to pull them off.
The new Friends section lets you see at a glance what your friends have been up to lately and who is online. See the most popular games in your network and see how you measure up against your friends with a Gamerscore leaderboard for the last 30 days.
There have also been improvements to the way you watch TV through your Xbox One. OneGuide’s live listings and schedules are now rolling out to 11 more countries: Belgium, Chile, Columbia, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Portugal, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, and Russia. Internet TV apps with live channels can now also integrate their listings with OneGuide. There is also an option now to have the Xbox default to TV when it is turned on, so you can turn it into a TV box that also plays games, instead of vice versa.
Check all of the update’s details on the Xbox Wire.
