Month: April 2020

There's a new Android 11 Developer Preview. This one is Preview 3, and it launched yesterday for Google's Pixel line. Previous Android 11 previews haven't had a ton of new additions, but this version has a lot of strange and interesting UI changes for us to discuss and puzzle over.

Recent Apps loses the app drawer

In Android 9 Pie, the Recent Apps screen turned into a horizontally scrolling list of thumbnails with an expandable app drawer at the bottom. In the Android 11 Preview 3 release, the app drawer is gone. It has been replaced with a pretty weak selection of two buttons: "Screenshot" and "Share."

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  Preview 3 Recent Apps dumps the bottom app drawer in exchange for two buttons, share and screenshot. It looks incomplete. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Removing the app drawer from Recent Apps is a pretty interesting decision, considering just two years ago Recent Apps was rearchitected to support this access to the app drawer. The app drawer and app icons are all a part of the home screen launcher, so to make the feature work in Recent Apps, the Recent Apps were pulled out of the core System UI and made a part of the launcher code. This saved Google from having to make any kind of special API allowing another app to access the app drawer—everything was just bundled into the launcher app.

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  A human being? In my Fallout 76? It's more likely than you think.

When Fallout 76 launched in late 2018, it wasn’t exactly a flawless experience, as publisher Bethesda would be the first to admit. It was buggy and glitchy, the online experience was inconsistent and subpar, and worst of all, the wasteland felt empty without the series’ classic NPC personalities and meaningful dialogue options.

A lot can change in a year and a half. Since its haphazard launch, Fallout 76 has received a number of quality-of-life updates and even got its own battle royale mode. But the always-online post-apocalyptic RPG’s actual saving grace might just be Wastelanders, a free, massive expansion that went live last week. Wastelanders brings living, breathing characters back to the Appalachian wastes, and suddenly West Virginia is a lot less lonely.

People who need non-player people

Of course, this expansion does a lot more than simply sprinkle a fresh helping of NPCs throughout the enormous map. Wastelanders also comes with new quests, including a core storyline that drives the narrative forward. Canonically, it takes place one year after Vault 76 reopened, and people are just starting to return to Appalachia. There are NPCs to befriend, factions to join, and dialogue trees to navigate, complete with the series’ trademark skill-check chat options.