Items tagged with api
Are physical wallets a necessity? Mobile payment apps like Apple Pay and Venmo have overall made it easier to forgo carrying around cash and credit cards. However, very few apps have been able to entirely replace physical identification cards like driver’s licenses or passports. Google is currently working on an API that would allow users to store digital ID’s on Android devices. According to a report by XDA Developers, Google is preparing their “IdentityCredential API”. This statement naturally elicits a bit of concern. Will hackers be able to easily access our personal information? What happens if our device is low on battery? Google’s IdentityCredential...
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Waiting for an app to update is not the end of the world, but it can certainly be very irritating. There soon may be a way to work around this annoyance; Google recently announced at the Android Dev Summit that users will be able to continue to use an app during less serious updates. Google’s latest "In-app Updates API" was released in response to the concerns of Android developers. Many devs were worried that users have not been updating their apps because it can be a disruptive process. Devs now have two options with the new API. First, devs can display a full message screen to let users know that an urgent update is available. The user can postpone the update if it is inconvenient...
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Futuremark has released a new segment of its popular 3DMark graphics testing suite called "API Overhead". The goal is simple: establish which CPU+GPU+API combination offers the best possible performance. Whether it's DirectX 12 or Vulkan, one thing the test can prove is that most other APIs, such as DirectX 11, are slugs in comparison. Futuremark's API Overhead test features a simple scene of blocks that get built to create the illusion of buildings. More of these buildings will be built in the time allotted depending on overall performance. The test is capped at 30 FPS for this reason: framerate doesn't matter as much as the number of draw calls. It's a very different kind of benchmark,...
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Oracle sued Google over its use of Java to build the Android operating system a few years ago, but Google won the case. However, an appeals court has overturned that ruling, finding that “the declaring code and the structure, sequence, and organization of the API packages are entitled to copyright protection”. This ruling is a big deal because it could severely limit what software makers can safely do without getting sued and could hamper innovation. Google is of course displeased with the ruling, but others in the industry are none too happy either. Image credit: orangesparrow/Flickr Bryan Cantrill, CTO of Joyent, told Wired that the notion that you can copyright APIs is a perverted...
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We recently had the chance to sit down with some folks at NVIDIA to discuss high performance graphics APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). With all of the noise recently surrounding AMD’s Mantle, DirectX 12, DirectX 11 and even OpenGL, NVIDIA wanted to clear the air somewhat, and explain the company’s position and plans to optimize and support current-gen and future APIs. As you’ve probably surmised in the myriad of discussions regarding Mantle and DirectX 12 recently, API efficiency is extremely important to ensure high performance in a given application. In our talk, NVIDIA explained that it is committed to improving the efficiency of current-gen, industry-standard...
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Earlier this month, Microsoft acknowledged that it would debut DirectX 12 at GDC this year, with promises that it would offer many of the same features as AMD's Mantle. Fast on the heels of that announcement came news that the API would also be deployed on the Xbox One, presumably as part of a future update. Now, a report from SemiAccurate claims that "Microsoft has adopted AMD’s Mantle but are now calling it DX12. The way they did it manages to pull stupidity from the jaws of defeat by breaking compatibility in the name of lock-in." Meanwhile, other reports across the 'Net are claiming that because the Xbox One has a real-time operating system, it won't benefit from the new API and that...
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Buzz has been building for the last week that Microsoft would soon unveil the next version of DirectX at the upcoming Games Developer Conference (GDC). Microsoft has now confirmed that its discussion forums at the show won't just be to discuss updates to DX11, but that it's putting a full court press behind the DirectX 12 brand and concept. This is something of a reversal for Microsoft, which has previously been mum on its plans for the API. It responded sharply over a year ago, when an AMD executive claimed that future versions of the API were essentially dead, but it's been over four years since DX11 debuted. Since then, we've seen point updates released and attached to Windows 8... and that's...
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When you're a computer capable of beating some of the world's greatest chess players, why keep all of that knowledge to yourself? That's a question that IBM is posing to its wildly intelligent supercomputer, Watson, and it appears that Watson has an answer. This week, IBM announced that, for the first time, it will make its IBM Watson technology available as a development platform in the cloud, to enable a worldwide community of software application providers to build a new generation of apps infused with Watson's cognitive computing intelligence. Why make such a move? According to IBM, the move aims to "spur innovation and fuel a new ecosystem of entrepreneurial software application providers...
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Although it might make smartphone hardware and UI designers feel the same way a fine chef does when a diner dumps ketchup all over their steak, there’s a smartphone add-on button in the works called Pressy that would let Android users perform a number of actions with simple button clicks. Pressy is a tiny button that fits into your headphone jack, and it’s surprisingly unobtrusive. It works with its own app, so users can set up a number of quick actions, including sending a message, taking a photo or video, recording a phone call, sending your location in case of emergency, and more. All of that is configurable through the app, so you can decide how many clicks will do what. By default...
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Making money on mobile apps has always been a bit of a challenge, generally speaking, for developers, but Amazon has unveiled a new way for them to generate a revenue stream with its new Amazon Mobile Associates API for Android devices. Essentially, devs can integrate an API in their apps that will allow them to sell actual items on Amazon from within the app, including physical products and digital ones alike. Users can see a product ad pop up and buy an item with Amazon’s 1-Click purchasing. The kicker is that the developer can take home up to 6% of the purchase in ad fees. Amazon gives the following examples: Sell a single item from Amazon in your app or game: The boss at the end of...
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For as wonderfully convenient as a cloud storage and syncing solution like Dropbox is, it’s still just essentially a place to park your files so that you can access them when you need them; it doesn’t replace your hard drive (on your desktop or mobile device), which contains all your settings and things like contacts and to do lists--basically, all your structured data. At its first ever developers conference today, Dropbox announced the Datastore API, which handles all of that structured data across multiple devices and operating systems. Dropbox likens it to a “simple embedded database” whose changes are automatically synced; further, the API resolves any conflicts if...
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When you first see Google Glass, your imagination runs wild with all of the possibilities. Sure, the obvious ones come to mind: looking at navigation routes and incoming e-mail right on your face, but what about an even more obvious one? We're talking about using Glass to recognize the face that's staring at you. Lambda Labs is getting ready to help Glass users accomplish just that, with a new API that should enable facial recognition using the existing Explorer Edition hardware. Over 1,000 developers are already using its existing API, but plugging it into Glass seems like the most advanced use yet. Once it's applied to Glass, users would (in theory) be able to remember faces, find friends in...
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With 300+ new features, it'd take at least one whole article to properly cover Apple's newest iteration of OS X, 10.5 a.k.a. Leopard. Some of the new 'features' are really more in the way of bringing programs like iCal up to date, but some of them are genuinely useful or just fun to tinker with. Most of the 300+ features are in the applications that come bundled with the OS, but there are still a healthy number of tweaks to the OS itself.It seems that most new OSes these days are getting larger, which means that more bugs inevitably find their way into the release copies. There's also bloatware and application compatibility to worry about when considering making the switch. ...
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Three years have passed since the European Commission ordered that Microsoft make three major changes to how it supplies interoperability information to other OS/NOS vendors seeking to develop products that can communicate with Windows desktops and servers.Change #1: developers must be allowed access to source code! That's right, MS is going to be going (even more) open-source, but only to a select audience of developers who might be forced into signing NDAs.Change #2: developers no longer pay on-going royalties, but rather a one-time 10,000 Euro ($14,189) fee to gain access to the interoperability information without fear of IP litigation. This is a major change from 2.98% of product-generated...
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