Microsoft News Bar is a news ticker for your desktop, now available in beta

Microsoft launched a new app for newshounds on the Microsoft Store today, dubbed Microsoft News Bar. The app is essentially a persistent news ticker for your desktop, serving up the latest headlines as they happen. There’s also a fair bit of customization to get the right fit for your desktop setup.

On launch, News Bar takes up a portion of the right side of your screen with a list of images for each news story. Hovering over each image will give you a preview of the story’s headline and a bit of text. If you see something you want to read further, you can click through to open the full story in your browser.

However, if the default setup isn’t for you, you can customize things a bit further. If you’d rathe see the headlines at a glance, there’s an option to have them overlaid on top of the images. You can also reposition the bar on to be on the left side, top, or bottom of your screen.

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When placed at the top of bottom of your desktop, News Bar switching to a scrolling bar of headlines without images. If you still want images, however, you can turn them back on through the app’s settings. Finally, the whole thing can be minimized when you want a break from the constant stream of stories.

It’s an intriguing concept for an app, and it will be interesting to see how Microsoft expands on the idea throughout the beta. If you want to give the app a shot, you can download the News Bar beta now from the Microsoft Store.

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