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New updates aim to make Android Pay a universal payment system
There's more to today's Android Pay news than just a long-awaited UK launch. Google doesn't want people to just think of Android Pay as a way to pay for things in stores with phones, so today it pulled back the curtain on new and updated APIs to let developers -- and merchants -- use Android Pay in more places and in different ways.
NVIDIA says it can make VR worlds sound and feel real
Tonight at NVIDIA's event in Texas, the company showed off some new tools that should help developers make VR experiences even more realistic. CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said its VR Works suite of APIs is getting a "major" upgrade, with the ability to connect haptic controllers to its PhysX physics engine for more realistic feedback, and the "world's first real time physically modeled acoustic simulator." As he described it, the audio engine works on top of the optics API to help it match what you can see. Sight, sound, physics and touch are all enhanced with its new Pascal-based GPUs, and NVIDIA says game developers are already working on implementing the new effects.
Microsoft wants you to hack together a 'Halo 5' app
Sure, you've been making multiplayer levels with Halo 5: Guardians' Forge mode, but now Microsoft wants you to create something different for the game. Like a web app or something along those lines for the stats coming from its online gametypes. Last year near Halo 5's launch developer 343 Industries released an API in beta, and now it's added access to "raw match events endpoint" data that the studio says will offer a wealth of info on each kill from any match. That's including, but not limited to, Gamertag of the rival, weapon used in the kill, where it was in terms of the game's play clock and map coordinates for where it went down.
Microsoft is trying to make Chrome extensions work on Edge
Microsoft's very first batch of Edge browser extensions is small, but it seems the company's taking steps to make sure Windows users get more in the future. According to Microsoft Senior Program Manager Jacob Rossi, the tech titan is developing a "porting tool to run Chrome extensions in Edge." It will presumably make things even easier for developers to create Edge versions of their extensions, though Rossi clarified that it doesn't support all APIs. The tool isn't finished yet, as well, but it's not like most users can start installing plug-ins on their browsers anyway. Redmond has just begun testing the feature, and for now, only Windows Insiders in the Fast ring can enjoy it.
Lyft wants you to hail rides through Facebook Messenger
You can already request an Uber car through Facebook Messenger, but what if you prefer to get around in Lyft cars? Don't worry, you're covered. The mustachioed ridesharing outfit has released a public programming toolkit that lets developers integrate Lyft features into virtually any app, with Facebook Messenger being the lead partner. If you happen to live in one of 11 launch cities (including Austin, New York, San Francisco and Washington, DC), you can now use Messenger to ask for a ride in between chats with your friends. The feature will be available to all Messenger users in the US next week.
Visa wakes up to the sound of the internet
If you had to name the pre-eminent internet payments platform, you'd probably say PayPal -- a fact that sends Visa executives into a frenzy. That's why the big V has announced that it's embracing this new-fangled interweb thing that it's just now heard about. The firm has announced the launch of Visa Developer, a way to open up the financial giant's infrastructure to anyone who wants to use it. If you're a company that wants to sell stuff, you can hook your products up to Visa's back end and get all of its skills with very little effort.
TfL is making it easier to beat traffic and find parking
With the majority of Brits now owning a smartphone or tablet, developers have jumped at the chance to deliver up-to-the-minute information on traffic and travel. Transport for London (TfL) has helped facilitate a number of these features by opening its data feeds, which let app makers display train departure times, ticket costs and even list which stations have toilet facilities.
Uber wants to keep you entertained while you ride
Uber pretty much has the whole getting us from A to B thing down pat, but having recently dropped off its billionth customer, the company has cause to reflect on all the downtime its users spend in transit. Our always-on lifestyles don't stop when we step into the back of Prius, after all, and Uber wants to help us make more efficient use of our travel time -- or rather, it wants app partners to. Since launching its API a couple years back, Uber has made it progressively easier for developers to bake ride-hailing features into their apps, with popular services like Facebook Messenger and StubHub doing just that. The new "Uber Trip Experiences" dev tools, however, let third-party apps access the finer details of your trips (with your permission, of course) so they can entertain, inform and generally make life a little easier for you while you're on the road.
The Fleye drone could be the safest flying robot at CES
Following its successful Kickstarter campaign, the Fleye drone made its debut at CES 2016 this week. The $1200 UAV is designed, first and foremost, with safety in mind. Its main rotor is encased in a plastic cage which in turn is wrapped in lightweight, impact resistant plastic. The unit also incorporates a sonar unit, six other sensors and a down-facing camera to help it both avoid obstacles and navigate via computer vision. The entire unit weighs just one pound -- uncannily light, given that it's roughly the size of a basketball. It's also outfitted with a 5 megapixel 1080p camera. The Fleye only has enough battery life for about ten minutes of flight time, however, thanks to its open source API and SDK, the UAV can easily be programmed for autonomous flight.
Uber's making it easy to request rides from other apps
With the introduction of the Uber API last year, the ridesharing company began opening its platform to third-party services. Today, Uber's expanding on that goal by launching the Ride Request Button, a feature developers can easily integrate into their iOS and Android apps. Uber explains that, with a few lines of codes, devs can add this button next to an address or another "intent to ride" area in an application, which users could then tap to call for a car pick-up. It's worth noting that Uber competitor Lyft started doing something similar recently, letting people request rides directly from Slack, the popular productivity-focused app.
Instagram won't let feed-reading apps browse your pics anymore
If you're one of the few still using a third-party app to browse Instagram feeds, you'll need to make other arrangements soon. The photo-sharing app is killing support of the feed API that allows outside apps and websites to pull in your feed as part of a larger effort to clean up its platform. With updates to its Platform Policy, Instagram will only let apps that help users share their photos access your collection of snapshots. For example, software that allows to your print your snapshots or use your Instagram photos as a profile picture will still be supported. Instagram will continue to lend a hand to advertisers and allow images and videos to be used on the web via embeds.
Google explains why some Nexus 5X pictures are upside down
If you recently splashed out on a brand spanking new Nexus 5X, you might be wondering why some of the images you take aren't the right way up. It turns out that it's a quirk of how the device was manufactured, thanks to a little insight from Google's Eino-Ville Talvala. After users began to complain about the issue on Reddit, the engineer popped up to explain where the problem comes from, and how to fix it.
Kardashian website security flaw exposes data for over 600,000 users
The Kardashian's new mobile apps may be extremely popular, but the websites recently launched alongside those offerings had a major flaw. An open unsecured API provided developer Alaxic Smith access to the names and email addresses of hundreds of thousands of subscribers when poked around Kylie Jenner's site -- over 600,000 on that site alone. What's more, Smith discovered that the same API was used across the other sister's sites, too. However, no payment info was accessible due to the fact that the sites themselves don't handle any funds, leaving that up to app stores and third-party services.
ICYMI: Google's face-policing API, Rage Rooms and more
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-380801{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-380801, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-380801{width:570px;display:block;} try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-380801").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: Google's new API for Android applications comes with face detection that can tell if you're smiling or not. Then there's the trend in Rage Rooms that looks like too much fun to keep to ourselves. And a hoax of an amazing prototype: A supposed adoption of Volkswagen technology birthed a stroller to follow you around, using collision sensors to avoid people or objects. This thing should really exist in some form, yes?
Honda looks to developers to make its robotic stool useful
Honda has always been more than a car company. In addition to its car and motorcycle business, it also manufacturers marine vehicles, generators, a weird robot and even planes. To keep that spirit of just making as much stuff as possible alive it introduced the Uni-Cub personal mobility system in May 2012. It's been refined since then, but it's still not something you can run down the dealer and purchase. Honda is looking to developers to expand the its use cases beyond rolling you around a museum with an upcoming API for the rolling bar stool.
Twitter rethinks its war against developers
For the past three years, Twitter has sent third-party developers not-so-subtle clues that they're unwanted -- its programming rules arbitrarily limit the success of unofficial apps, such as their audience sizes or features. That low ceiling might not last for much longer, though. Co-founder Ev Williams tells tech conference guests that the restrictive API was one of Twitter's "strategic errors." Twitter should be a platform that developers genuinely want to build on, he says, and the earlier decision "wasn't a win/win" for developers, users or even Twitter itself.
Google wants more Chromecast multiplayer games and autoplaying apps
Google has sold 17 million Chromecasts thus far, but it obviously wants to sell more and make the media player more valuable to current users at the same time. The company is releasing a bunch of new APIs that will allow developers to create even better apps, games and experiences. To start with, Mountain View is making it easier for them to tailor second-screen experiences for both iOS and Android. That could lead to more games that use phones as controllers (see above), as well as other types of apps like photo editors that place editing tools on smartphone displays.
Third-party Twitter apps will display quoted tweets properly soon
It's been six weeks or so since Twitter revamped its "quoted tweet" function, saving users valuable characters and generally improving the experience for everyone using the site or the official apps. Now, it's updating its API to support the changes, which will allow third-parties to properly display the quotes in their apps. To be clear, that's all the update will allow for: displaying quotes correctly. Actually quoting tweets, according to Tweetium for Windows, is not supported by the API change, and it's unsure if or when that'll happen.
Microsoft thinks it can guess your age using facial recognition
Since we're right smack in the middle of Microsoft's BUILD dev conference, the company's showing off one of it's Azure APIs with a site you can put to the test. How-Old.net allows you to upload a picture before the site recognizes faces and analyzes them to determine their age. No, I'm not 41... I'm 31, and that picture is from over two years ago. Other folks here at Engadget received results closer to their real age, but it made us wonder: why not use a web cam to snap a picture under current conditions. You know, after I've had a chance to apply my daily dose of wrinkle remover. Perhaps that option on the way.
Google will fix Chrome's scrolling with Microsoft's help
Smoother scrolling is coming to Chrome, as Google will integrate Microsoft's Pointer Events API into a future version of the browser. To say that Google and Microsoft haven't had the best working relationship would be an understatement. The companies have been warring on several different fronts, with browsers and the future of the web being a major sticking point. As Ars Technica reports, now that Internet Explorer (and all the legacy that comes with it) is about to be retired in favor of a sleeker, standards-friendly browser, the two companies -- or at least their browser teams -- are starting to warm to one another.
