Month: November 2017

Enlarge / The control center has a new interface for adjusting brightness.

Unbeknownst to many, the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi toggles in the Control Center in iOS 11 don't do what you expect. Rather than completely disabling those features, they only partially disable Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. To clear up any confusion, Apple appears to have added explainer pop-up messages when either Bluetooth or Wi-Fi is toggled off, as first detailed in a report by MacRumors. The messages appear in the newest iOS 11.2 beta and they explain that both features will only be temporarily disabled when turned off from their Control Center toggles.

The first time a user turns off Bluetooth or Wi-Fi from the Control Center on their device, they'll see a pop-up window that will say "disconnecting nearby Wi-Fi until tomorrow" or "disconnecting Bluetooth accessories until tomorrow." The messages also explain that both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are not totally disconnected in this case, however, they will still function to allow some features and devices to work with that iDevice. Bluetooth will still be available for the Apple Watch, Apple Pencil, Personal Hotspot, and Handoff, while Wi-Fi will still be on for AirDrop, Personal Hotspot, and location accuracy.

While the Control Center toggles turn off Bluetooth and Wi-Fi temporarily, there are a few cases detailed in an Apple support document that will turn both features back on automatically. Wi-Fi will turn back on when you connect to a Wi-Fi network via the Settings app; when you walk or drive to a new location; when it's 5am local time; or when you restart your device. Bluetooth is similar: the feature will turn back on when you connect to a Bluetooth device via the Settings app; when it's 5am local time; or when you restart your device. In order to fully disable Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, you'll have to use the dedicated toggles in the Settings app.

Enlarge / Much like this space-defense mission, EA's launch plans for the Star Wars: Battlefront II economy seem to be blowing up. (credit: EA/DICE)

Before we deliver a proper verdict for Star Wars: Battlefront II, we want to take a moment to talk about the game's troubling, multilayered economy. The online multiplayer shooter is now officially available for paying EA Access subscribers, which offers a 10-hour trial of the game ahead of its November 16 launch on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4.

Fans are already biting into that game-economy burrito, and it sure seems like a seven-layer thing, made up of loot boxes, battle points, credits, crystals, crafting parts, and star cards (which themselves come in two types and four tiers). The whole thing already looks confusing and messy, and fans have pointed out major issues with how the economy debuted in the game's paid EA Access launch this weekend.

EA has since responded to fans' most heated complaints, both in ridiculous and seemingly sensible ways. But even EA's best response belies a glaring truth: nothing short of a full rewrite will undo the damage of real money to Battlefront II's gameplay mechanics.

Firefox is fast now. (credit: Mozilla)

Mozilla is working on a major overhaul of its Firefox browser, and, with the general release of Firefox 57 today, has reached a major milestone. The version of the browser coming out today has a sleek new interface and, under the hood, major performance enhancements, with Mozilla claiming that it's as much as twice as fast as it was a year ago. Not only should it be faster to load and render pages, but its user interface should remain quick and responsive even under heavy load with hundreds of tabs.

Collectively, the performance work being done to modernize Firefox is called Project Quantum. We took a closer look at Quantum back when Firefox 57 hit the developer channel in September, but the short version is, Mozilla is rebuilding core parts of the browser, such as how it handles CSS stylesheets, how it draws pages on-screen, and how it uses the GPU.

This work is being motivated by a few things. First, the Web has changed since many parts of Firefox were initially designed and developed; pages are more dynamic in structure and applications are richer and more graphically intensive. JavaScript is also more complex and difficult to debug. Second, computers now have many cores and simultaneous threads, giving them much greater scope to work in parallel. And security remains a pressing concern, prompting the use of new techniques to protect against exploitation. Some of the rebuilt portions are even using Mozilla's new Rust programming language, which is designed to offer improved security compared to C++.