Xbox 360 Feature Focus: My Pins

Taking a cue from Windows Phone and Windows 8, the new Xbox 360 Dashboard supports pinning frequently-used content to a special area of the home screen. It’s not quite as full-featured as the similar feature on other systems, but it’s a nice improvement over pinning in the previous Dashboard.

I wrote about the Fall 2012 Dashboard Update in Microsoft Begins Delivering Dashboard Update for Xbox 360. Overall, it’s an evolutionary update to the existing Dashboard, and Microsoft is now rolling it out automatically to all Xbox 360 consoles around the world.

As it turns out, pinning isn’t new to the 360. Microsoft actually introduced the concept of pinning items to the Xbox 360 Dashboard with the Fall 2011 Dashboard Update. In that release, it was possible to pin favorite music items—artists, albums, or songs—to a special My Pins area of Zune Marketplace. That functionality is still present today, though it can now be found in the My Pins area inside Xbox Music.

What’s new is that there’s now a global My Pins area in the home view of the Dashboard. You can pin movies, TV shows, games, web sites and apps (but, go figure, not music or videos) to this area.

Inside My Pins, you’ll find a collection of the items you’ve pinned, sorted by when you pinned them, with the most recently pinned item first. However, you can move items around and reorder them as needed.

You can pin items from two general areas of the UI. When you view the Details screen for a movie, TV show, game, web site, or apps, you’ll see a Pin to Home tile. Just tap that to add the item to the My Pins area.

Alternatively, when you’re viewing a list of items, such as in search results, you can tap the X button to display More Options. One of those options will be a Pin to Home tile.

Either way, My Pins provides a handy and easily-accessible area for those non-music and video items you need to access most frequently.