How to set up Android Pay

How to set up Android Pay and add your preferred payment and loyalty cards.

Since it was first introduced back in 2015, Android Pay has been steadily rolling out around the world, most recently arriving in Canada. With more shops supporting Android Pay via NFC and more banking institutions offering the service to its clients, there’s no better time to start setting up Android Pay on your phone. Here’s how to get started.

Setting up Android Pay the first time

When you load up Android Pay for the first time and log into your preferred Google account, the app will automatically recognize any credit cards associated with your Google Play account and request to add them to Android Pay. Depending on the banking institution, you may need to go through a verification process to confirm things.

You’ll also be asked to allow Android Pay a slew of permissions as you’d expect, including NFC which you’ll absolutely need to turn on if you want to use Android Pay’s tap-to-pay features. The app will also request to be your primary payment method. You may only see that notification if you’ve previously used Samsung Pay or another banking app.

How to add a credit or debit card

While Android Pay will automatically add any credit cards associated with your Google Play account, chances are you have other credit or debit cards you’d also like to use. You can find out which banks are supported in the USA. In Canada, most major banks offer Android Pay support but it is currently unavailable to Canadian credit union members.

Tap to launch the Android Pay app.
Tap the add card icon, which looks like a “+” symbol.
Tap add a credit or debit card
Follow along with the onscreen instructions. You’ll have the option to scan your card using your phone’s camera or manually enter your card information.

Once your card has been added you will be required to activate it via your financial institution.

How to add a loyalty program card

Android Pay is also a great way to keep all your loyalty cards in one convenient place.

Tap to launch the Android Pay app.
Tap the add card icon, which looks like a “+” symbol.

Tap Add a loyalty program.

Use the search bar to find the loyalty card you wish to add.

Use your phone’s camera to scan your card’s barcode or manually enter your card’s info to add it to Android Pay.

How to add a gift card

On top of your debit, credit, and loyalty cards, you can also use Android Pay to store all your gift cards digitally and in one place.

Tap to launch the Android Pay app.
Tap the add card icon, which looks like a “+” symbol.

Tap Add a gift card

Use the search bar to find the associated business for the gift card you wish to add.

Enter the gift card information and tap Save.

Your gift card along with the remaining balance will be displayed amongst your other cards.

Ben Heck’s Super Glue Gun: Programming and electronics

Armed with some early insight from his Great Glue Gun project, Ben goes heads down on redesigning a 3D-printed mount for the motor using Autodesk Fusion 360. Still, it makes sense to check these things before committing to a 3D print, so Ben laser-cuts a paper pattern first to see if fits. It’s not all about physical design, though — it’s time to start programming the ATTiny microcontrollers with AtmelStudio and C++. Thanks to a bit of Boolean logic and binary arithmetic, Ben can control the motor with a technique called “pulse width modulation,” or PWM! Make sure you follow along with the build over on the element14 Community and chime in with any ideas you have.

SpaceX triumphs with its first-ever launch of a recycled cargo ship

Why it matters to you

This latest achievement brings SpaceX’s goal of manned missions to Mars that little bit closer.

After a couple of days’ delay because of poor weather, it was all systems go for SpaceX at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on Saturday.

Its latest mission — this one sending supplies and equipment to the International Space Station (ISS) — got underway at 5.07 p.m. ET when the Falcon 9 engines fired up to send the unmanned rocket spaceward.

The mission, a success on all fronts, marked another milestone for Elon Musk’s private space company as it was the first re-flight of one of its Dragon spacecrafts. The cargo ship first traveled to the ISS back in September 2014.

Dragon confirmed in good orbit. https://t.co/gtC39uBC7z

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) June 3, 2017

The accomplishment comes two months after Space X successfully completed the first re-flight — and landing — of an orbital class rocket.

Saturday’s effort also saw the Falcon 9 rocket make a perfect landing back at Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station 7 minutes and 40 seconds after leaving terra firma. It’s the eleventh time SpaceX has performed a perfect landing with one of its Falcon 9 rockets

On June 5, the Dragon spacecraft is set to dock with the ISS, where it will stay for the rest of the month. After that it will leave the space station and head back to Earth, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Baja California.

Saturday’s flawless mission highlights the impressive progress being made by the SpaceX team in its ongoing quest to create a reliable and cost-effective reusable rocket system that could one day carry humans on trips into deep space.

The entire event was broadcast live on SpaceX’s YouTube channel, with commentary provided throughout explaining the mission’s multiple stages as it proceeded.

In the video above, you can see the Falcon 9 rocket lift off at the 29:55 mark, and also the spectacular rocket landing at 37:25.

Sony is building a full-frame digital camera for pro filmmakers

If you’ve ever shot video with a full-frame DSLR, you know how alluring it can be — that large sensor can be perfect for low-light shots and soft backgrounds. However, pro cinematographers have generally had to “settle” for Super 35mm and smaller sizes, even when using top-tier 8K cameras. Sony doesn’t think pros should have to compromise, though. It’s developing a brand new CineAlta camera (not pictured) with a 36mm x 24mm sensor — the first full-frame sensor in a high-end movie camera, in fact. The company isn’t divulging all the cam’s capabilities just yet, but it is setting some expectations beyond the “exceptional” image quality.

To begin with, the as yet unnamed CineAlta is “aspect ratio-agnostic.” You can shoot 4K RAW footage in 4:3, 17:9 or other relatively uncommon video ratios. Sony is also promising that you won’t have to ditch your existing workflow you’re already used to its movie-grade formatting, and it’ll work with both existing and upcoming CineAlta accessories. In short: filmmakers won’t have to disrupt their production methods just to go full frame, at least not if they’re Sony fans.

The camera arrives in early 2018, and it’s likely to be expensive compared to other high-end cameras (Sony’s own F65 sold for $65,000 when new in 2011). We wouldn’t be surprised if some studios are willing to pay that premium, mind you. It could prove indispensable for nighttime scenes and close-ups. Also, the image quality may be a boon for online video services that want to produce as much 4K HDR content as they can — it may be easier to nab subscribers with eye-popping visuals.

Via: RedShark, Cinema5D, News Shooter

Source: Sony

Android Pay is your new shopping BFF in Taiwan

Google has been bringing Android Pay to new regions in an attempt to expand its limited availability. After landing in the UK last year and in Canada more recently, the mobile payment system has now made its way to Taiwan, where you can use it in places that have contactless payment terminals and to pay for online purchases from local stores. If you’re traveling to the country in the near future, it’s probably wise to download the app and to link a card in case you run out of New Taiwan dollars and need to pay for some Asian make-up at Watsons or a coffin bread at a restaurant.

However, the Taiwanese version of Android Pay is far from complete, just like the version that came out in Canada. According to Engadget Chinese, the tech titan has yet to roll out support for a number of major Asian banks and cards. Google has apparently integrated Google Maps into the Android Pay app, though, so you can get promos and deals from partner retailers in real time based on your location. It’s unclear if the feature will be available everywhere Android Pay is, but we’ll keep an eye out for you.

Via: CNET

Source: Engadget Chinese, Google

Valve promises a low fee for direct-to-Steam game publishing

When Valve unveiled its plans to simplify game publishing through Steam Direct, it struggled to settle on a fee. Did it want to go low and make publishing more accessible, or go high to prevent abusers from putting out a never-ending stream of garbage? After a long deliberation, it’s going with the former price. Valve has revealed that it will charge indies a $100 recoupable fee — the lowest it was willing to consider. The company made the choice after looking at community discussions and realizing that it was hard to justify anything more than the minimum cost. Instead of using the price as a quality filter, it’s betting that thorough oversight will be enough.

Valve is promising to “closely monitor” game submissions and use human input to verify that Steam’s store algorithm is surfacing the truly interesting titles. Combine that with greater transparency and you may not have to worry that a hastily produced knockoff is getting more attention than an original gem.

The gaming giant is also rethinking its Curators feature to give these advisors more power when recommending titles for you to play. It’ll be easier to Curators to create personal lists that offer specific advice, such as games to buy during a sale. They’ll also get to showcase more of their own content (such as their YouTube material), and it should be faster for them to obtain pre-release access to a title. Curators are optional, so you don’t have to see their selections if you’re comfortable shopping on your own.

There’s still no firm date for when Steam Direct will go live. However, the fee by itself already gives a feel for what you can expect. While $100 isn’t a throwaway amount, it’s small enough that even a solo part-time developer can publish on Steam with relatively little trouble. If Valve had ventured toward the higher end of its fee range (it was leaning toward $500, but could have gone as high as $5,000), it might have limited Steam Direct to more dedicated creators. In other words, you can expect to see more personal projects that aren’t quite so focused on turning a profit.

Source: Steam Blog

TouchArcade iOS Gaming Roundup: Waking Mars, Magic Quest: TCG, Minecraft, and More

Over at TouchArcade, we’ve been running around like maniacs all week getting ready for the WWDC and E3 double header that we’re about to fly to the West Coast for. The event scheduling gods were kind to us this year, allowing us to attend both events.

For whatever reason, the last few years have had WWDC and E3 taking place on the same week, and we’d opted to attend E3 over WWDC as it’s a overall safer bet that there will be more relevant things for us at a gaming event. With WWDC tickets shifting to being luck of the draw, it’s entirely possible that there just won’t be that many iOS game developers for us to talk to. Either way, better late than never, read on for the big things that happened this week in the world of iOS gaming.

Our 2012 game of the year, Waking Mars, finally got updated to 64-bit. If you’ve never played it before, now is a great time to check out the game as it just became way more future proof. Waking Mars is a very unique game that’s hard to pigeon hole into any one specific genre. I suppose calling it a “puzzle platformer” would make the most sense, as you’re exploring the caves of Mars, but instead of having an array of weapons, all of the tasks in the game are accomplished by planting things. It’s a great premium experience, and one I wish we saw more of these days. For more on Waking Mars, check out our review.

Magic Quest: TCG was released this week, and while the title of the game could not possibly be more generic (and the gameplay is about what you’d expect of a fantasy collectable card game), it does have one really awesome feature we wish were in more games like this. In Blizzard’s Hearthstone for instance, like most other free to play collectable card games, your collection of cards is locked to your account. Sure, there are clever ways each of the games in this genre allow you to craft cards with your duplicates, but that’s about it. Magic Quest: TCG, on the other hand, has a full-featured player-driven auction house where players can sell their cards to other players. It’s a cool feature we’d love to see in more games.

Knights of Pen & Paper 2 has re-launched as a free to play game. It’s never a great sign when a developer needs to retune a game’s monetization (as it typically means the game failed in its original state), but Knights of Pen & Paper 2 works pretty well as a free to play game. We dinged the game when it was first released in our review, but that isn’t true anymore as the game has seen significant updates since its release. In the game, you play a light-hearted spin on the RPG formula told through an interesting blend between tabletop RPG mechanics and what you’d expect of an actual RPG video game. It’s definitely worth checking out if you like non-traditional RPGs (particularly when they’re free).

Vainglory is the king of mobile MOBA’s, but it hasn’t really felt like it has caught on in any meaningful way outside of its hardcore playerbase. Session times of the original game mode ran upwards of 20 minutes, which is a lot to ask when most mobile gamers are used to playing a few minutes at a time. They’ve since introduced other game modes which significantly shorten the session length, and in this most recent update those two modes, Blitz and Battle Royale, both got a lot of attention. They just added a new talent system which spices up these modes even further. If you’re looking for something like DOTA 2 or League of Legends for your iOS device, Vainglory is as close as you’re going to get.

Minecraft Pocket Edition is undoubtedly the most accessible version of Minecraft out there, but it has always lagged behind both PC and console iterations of the game when it came to its feature set. With each update, that becomes less and less true, particularly with this week’s addition of the Minecraft Marketplace. Fourteen pieces of new content are now available in the in-game store, ranging from new worlds and new survival spawns to texture packs and skin packs. If you have kids who play Minecraft on their iPad, they’ve probably already asked you to buy some of this stuff. If not, get ready, because that’s coming.

If there’s going to be any game that’s going to steal Hearthstone’s thunder, it’s Elder Scrolls: Legends, a similar collectable card game set in the Elder Scrolls universe. (The same as Skyrim, Morrowind, and others.) The game is far more complicated than Hearthstone, and plays a lot closer to Magic the Gathering, which can be a good or a bad thing depending on what you like or don’t like about Hearthstone. Anyway, while the game has been available on the PC and iPad for a while now, it’s slowly making its way to mobile. It was just released on Android with it coming to “other” mobile phones early this summer.

Reigns is an incredible game, and if you haven’t played it yet, you need to stop what you’re doing and go grab it from the App Store. The game is controlled entirely through Tinder-like swipes, and you play the game by making binary decisions by either swiping left or right. What’s fascinating about playing Reigns is that from a gameplay perspective, it could not be more simple, but they’re able to do incredibly complicated things just by swiping right or left. The developers gave a talk at GDC where they discussed the design of the game (seen in the above video). It’s a fascinating presentation that dives deep into the nitty gritty of the thought process behind building Reigns.

As far as other new games to check out this week are concerned, Yankai’s Peak is a fantastic puzzle game where you’re rotating pyramids around a puzzle board. The concept is incredibly simple, but like many great puzzle games, gets amazingly difficult to the point that we got stumped for the first time barely ten levels in. If you’re looking for something that uses a little less brain power, Noodlecake’s Bouncy Hoops somehow manages to combine the Flappy Bird “flap” controls and basketball. It’s stupid how well it works and how impossible it is to put down.

Last, but not least, is Sega’s Crazy Taxi Gazillionaire, which is a clicker idle game that is so weird that you have to try it. Crazy Taxi is/was a frantic driving game, so to remove all of the actual driving while still feeling distinctly Crazy Taxi is … very odd, in a good way.

Anyway, that’s about it for this week’s big iOS gaming news and game releases. For all this and more, be sure to visit TouchArcade where we post this sort of stuff around the clock!

Tag: TouchArcade gaming roundup
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Hangouts calls on iPhones now appear as regular voice calls

It took a while, but Google Hangouts has finally followed in Facebook Messenger’s footsteps and started taking advantage of iOS 10’s Callkit. That means calls you receive on Hangouts will appear as regular voice calls on your iPhones’ lock screen — but only if you want them to. Callkit gives VoIP services the ability to use Apple’s stock Phone app, so you can ring people through Hangouts from within the stock app itself. If you’re the recipient, the only indication that it’s a VoIP call is a small mark underneath the contact’s name telling you that it’s using Hangouts audio. That way, you won’t wander to an area without coverage by mistake while talking on the phone.

You don’t have to tolerate the new feature if you’d rather have VoIP calls that look distinct from ones made through mobile networks, though. In fact, you have to manually activate it by going into Settings inside the Hangouts app. Just toggle “Answer on lock screen” to activate it… or to switch it off if you change your mind.

Via: 9to5mac

Source: Hangouts (iTunes)

Major identity manager breach exposes sensitive user info

Identity and password management services are, in theory, supposed to improve your security by promoting tough-to-guess passwords and otherwise keeping logins under lock and key. However, the concentration of high-value data also makes them a juicy target for hackers — and OneLogin is finding that out the hard way. The business-centric identity management provider has warned users of a US server breach that compromised sensitive info. While OneLogin initially provided only a handful of details in a blog post, Motherboard learned that an email warned customers their info had been taken. Moreover, the attackers compromised the “ability to decrypt” data — don’t count on your login being safe just because there was encryption involved.

The email recommends aggressive steps to protect accounts, including generating new keys, tokens and security certificates. Naturally, OneLogin also wants individual users to change their passwords. None of these are small feats if you’re a customer — effectively, you’re rebooting your entire sign-in infrastructure.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that you should stop using identity and login management services, or that every service will face a similar fate if there’s a hack. OneLogin notably keeps the decryption keys on its systems, while services like LastPass don’t. You may be hosed if you forget your master login for a site like LastPass, but you won’t have to worry so much if there’s a breach. Regardless of what you use, the incident is a reminder that you’re striking a balance: you’re trusting someone else with your data in return for greater convenience.

Via: Motherboard, Krebs on Security

Source: OneLogin Blog

The Samsung Chromebook Plus might be the best place to try new Android features

A Chromebook has a newer version of Android than almost every phone.

If you want to check out the latest features for Android as soon as you can you know what phone to buy: The Pixel. But you still won’t be able to check out every feature because a few are always going to be dependent on screen size. The Samsung Chromebook Plus has you covered. It’s just a better buy in 2017 than a Pixel C and offers the same level of Android support. We’re seeing this now, and it’s not likely to change unless we get new hardware from Google this fall.

Android 7.1.1 for Chromebooks is available right now if you’re willing to run Chrome Canary.

A disclaimer is in order. the Chromebook Plus only has Android 7.1.1 if you run the ChromeOS Canary build. We’re not sure exactly when it will come to more usable branches or even to the stable build, but know that Google is focusing on getting Android on Chrome to the latest version and keeping it there when Android is updated. I don’t recommend anyone who has a Chromebook and enjoys using it to switch to Canary because there will be headaches and broken things. That’s what Canary is — a test bed for things to see how broken they are and what needs to be changed. But if you’re a developer who needs to get ready for what’s next with Android TV or tablets or even other Chromebooks, having it available outside of an emulator is pretty awesome.

A look back at the Google I/O 2017 session Android Apps for Chromebooks and Large Screen Devices shows us why. ChromeOS can look at the version of Android it is running and then adjust how app windows are drawn. Apps target for versions before Marshmallow will show in a static view. Apps targeted for Marshmallow will have two views: windowed and full-screen. Apps targeted for Nougat will be completely resizable.

Cool new features need cool new devices to test them on.

This addresses a major problem that isn’t new or unique to Chromebooks — how to handle legacy applications with no support for new features. It also means the Chromebook Plus is a perfect tool for developers who want to update existing apps or write new ones that support the latest version of Android.

This will carry on when Android O becomes final. The Pixel (or whatever new device Google offers at launch) will be great for testing notification features and new ways to conserve power, but things like universal Picture in Picture are important to test on a larger device. This is all great for developers but it also means people like us — regular users who want the most from their purchase — have a better experience.

This is happening because of how the software on a Chromebook is updated. Samsung has the final say before any updates come to the stable channel, but it doesn’t get to decide how these updates are built or what features they will include. The manufacturer can install an app or extension (most don’t, but ASUS has) on top and certainly has some input on what goes into a new version but the system, including the Android version, is from Google. This is probably why not every Chromebook gets updated at the same time, but it also means that every one of them will be feature by feature identical.

We would hate this on our phones but expect it in a laptop. Every computer running Windows or MacOS has the same system software on it. Regardless of the reason, it means that the Chromebook Plus is almost a required tool for developers and the device to have if you want access to everything a new version of Android has to offer.

We expect every laptop from Apple or Microsoft to have the same features, and Chromebooks follow suit.

I also have a pretty good feeling inside that Samsung and Google are working together on the whole multi-window experience for Android, because it’s pretty important for both companies. Samsung has great support for sizable floating windows, but only for apps developed specifically to support it. It’s really improved and a cool feature on the new Tab S3, and is really needed if they want to continue development for DeX. But what Samsung needs is for Google to build in support at the system level with an intelligent way to support apps that are old. Since there are no extra hurdles when updating the Chromebook Plus, it appears to be the test bed.

Maybe we’ll see a large-format device from Google later in 2017. Maybe not. But the next version of Samsung’s Android software will be better because of the Chromebook Plus. And so will everyone else’s.

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