What is this sidebar?

Question

I keep bringing the below sidebar up by mistake. I am not sure exactly how I get it to appear and so far I have only seen it for music. What is this called and it it just specific to the music application?

Answer 1

What your image shows is a pinned app.

As far as I know, there are currently two ways to pin an app.

• Using gestures:
  1. Drag the app to either side of the screen until a vertical divider appears:
     • If the app is the current one in full screen, move the mouse to the top of the screen. Your cursor should turn into a hand. Now you can left-click and hold the app to drag it around.
     • If the app is running in the background, move the cursor to either of the left corners and then move it towards the left center. An overview of all your running apps will appear. Now you can move your cursor over the desired app and then left-click and hold to drag it around.
  2. Drop it.
  3. (You can always unpin an app by grabbing it and moving it to the center.)
• Using the keyboard:
  • Win+. to cycle forward through different ways to pin the app.
  • Win+Shift+. to cycle backward through different ways to pin the app.

Answer 2

This is a sidebar with metro apps. go to the top of that xbox music window until you see a hand mouse pointer. Click and hold (at the top when you see that hand) and drag it to the bottom to close the app. (or drag it to the right to make it bigger)

Answer 3

It's a "pinned" app, and allows you to run the app in a "slim" mode while you focus on the main application - many Modern UI apps support it.

You activate it by starting to drag the previous app in from the left hand side, but stopping before it goes "full screen".

You can hide the pinned app by swiping the "grab bar" (three grey dots) back off the screen, or make the pinned app "main" and the main app pinned on the other side by dragging the bar to the right.