In short, you can install Apple’s HomeKit Accessory Simulator app and add a Mac’s webcam as a HomeKit accessory.

➝ Source: reddit.com

Kevin Rose is rebooting Digg with Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit. I was a huge fan of Digg in the early days and am excited to see what this reboot has in store.

They’ve published a quick promotional video on YouTube, but it doesn’t shed any light on what to expect.

➝ Source: reboot.digg.com

Emanuel Maiberg, reporting for 404 Media:

If you use Bing, DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, Qwant or any other alternative search engine that doesn’t rely on Google’s indexing and search Reddit by using “site:reddit.com,” you will not see any results from the last week. DuckDuckGo is currently turning up seven links when searching Reddit, but provides no data on where the links go or why, instead only saying that “We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us.” Older results will still show up, but these search engines are no longer able to “crawl” Reddit, meaning that Google is the only search engine that will turn up results from Reddit going forward.

The only reason that Reddit is such a great source of information is because, generally, all of the content published to it is written by people that have first-hand experience with the topic they’re discussing. When you see a Reddit link in search results, it probably has the right answer for you.

It’s a shame that Reddit is preventing other search engines from crawling their site, but I’m hopefully that something else will fill that vacuum.

➝ Source: 404media.co

Wasingtheisofwas, writing on Reddit:

I reach out to customer service. They tell me that I have violated the terms and conditions of the app store. I ask them to explain and they say that the account has been flagged for “Fraudulent Patterns”. I have no idea what that means, or what I could possibly have done on my iPhone that would constitute fraud. 

The customer support rep tells me that I will need to create a new Apple ID. When I ask him what will happen to all of the content that I have paid for over the years, as well as the subscriptions that I am currently paying for, he tells me that there is nothing he can do and that I cannot be refunded.

This is the kind of story that makes me exceedingly hesitant to rely on Apple’s services. And it makes Apple’s requirement that all iOS software be distributed through the App Store feel like extortion.

I hope we’re nearing a future where you can realistically use an iPhone without an Apple ID at all — replacing all of Apple’s services, including the App Store, with independent alternatives.

(Via Michael Tsai.)

➝ Source: old.reddit.com

I’m going to share, what I expect to be, a controversial opinion about the new API pricing from Reddit. Not because I’m some big fan of Reddit — I follow a single subreddit through RSS and only do so because that same information isn’t easily digestible from anywhere else.

I would prefer that everyone leave Reddit and move to the open web for distributed, open source, community-run alternatives. We’ve allowed the current crop of social media companies to overstay their welcome. We should have all moved on from Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of the bunch years ago.

But — brace yourself — I don’t think Reddit’s new API pricing is catastrophic for the third-party app ecosystem.

We can quibble about whether or not developers need to pay their “fair share” and what exactly “fair” would be in this context, but it seems to me that you can still build a third-party Reddit client that is economically feasible with this new pricing. But these third-party developers would need to charge more than they currently do.

We’ll look at Apollo here since that’s the app I’m most familiar with and the one that’s received the most attention throughout this within my circle.

Christian Selig, writing on Reddit about the API pricing:

Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which would put it at about 1.7 million dollars per month, or 20 million US dollars per year. Even if I only kept subscription users, the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month, which is over double what the subscription currently costs, so I’d be in the red every month.

Based on the $20 million per year in API fees number and the average per user per month cost of $2.50, that puts Apollo at about 666,000 active users.

How much was Apollo charging for the app, you may ask? According to Juli Clover at MacRumors:

Right now, Apollo Pro is a one-time $4.99 fee that unlocks additional features, and Apollo Ultra is an even more premium tier that costs $12.99 per year.

I’m not a fan of subscription pricing, generally, but this seems criminally underpriced for what the app is providing. It’s a far better experience than what you get from Reddit themselves and a significant discount compared to Reddit Premium — which is $5.99 per month or $49.99 per year.

So what if Apollo charged $6 per month — the same as Reddit Premium? Taking out $2.50 for Reddit’s cut and about $1.80 for Apple’s, that would give Apollo about $1.70 per user per month.

If every existing user paid, that would be about $1.1 million per month in earnings after Apple and Reddit’s cut.

If only a third of those users paid, that would be over $350,000 per month.

I don’t know what the operating costs are for Apollo and, in an ideal world, perhaps Reddit’s fees are a bit higher than they should be. But my back of the napkin math tells me that it’s totally feasible to develop a third-party Reddit app and make enough money from it for a small team to earn a reasonable living.

But to do so, Reddit’s essentially forcing third-party developers to charge at least as much per month as Reddit’s own premium subscription. From Reddit’s perspective, this makes total sense. Why would they want third-party apps to provide a better experience at a lower cost than Reddit’s own offering?

Now this isn’t to say that third-party developers should just put on their big boy pants, pay the new fees, and end the boycotts. By all means, continue with the boycotts, try to convince Reddit to lower their API fees as much as possible, and move as many communities to the open web as you can.

But don’t say that the new pricing makes it impossible to build a third-party app. Because that’s not true. It would just require pricing apps so they’re more in-line with Reddit’s own offering.

Push to WordPress (v1.1): A major update to my publishing workflow. The update makes use of my new writing template — originally discussed in Launch Ulysses Workflow — to incorporate post metadata into the Ulysses sheet.

Push to WordPress (v1.1) no longer asks for the URL slug, tags, post type, and custom field content. Instead, that information is obtained by Workflow with regular expressions on the exported text. The update also skips the WordPress dashboard and asks for a publish date from within Workflow.

If you’re interested in learning more about this workflow’s update, I’ve written about the changes in its own article. And if you’re interested in the original, links to that version and my initial write-up, explaining the thought process behind it, will remain below.

—July 7, 2016

For as long as the iPhone has existed, some portion of my writing took place on iOS, but it’s never been as easy as it is now. A few weeks ago, I shared the workflow I use to kickstart link publishing on Initial Charge. I’ve used it almost everyday for about a month and it continues to amaze me each time.

Between Workflow and Ulysses, my writing process has been greatly streamlined and the amount of time I’ve saved is beginning to add up. It may seem like just a few minutes here and there, but that’s slowly turned into a few extra hours that I can allocate elsewhere. There’s been multiple instances over the past week in which I’ve emptied all of my inboxes — Instapaper, Overcast, Reeder, Tweetbot, and Dispatch. Doing so before I started using Ulysses and Workflow was a rarity, but now it’s becoming commonplace and I’m starting to enjoy these unexpected breaks.

Workflow has done the majority of the heavy-lifting for me in that regard. Many of the tasks which used to require multiple steps and a lot of tapping can be performed in the action sheet. Since the last time I’ve written about the app I’ve built workflows for searching Initial Charge, converting text to title case, and displaying the word count of selected text on a web page. This is stuff I do a handful of times each week that are now much quicker to perform, thanks to Workflow.

But the workflow that’s made the largest impact has been Push to WordPress. As I’ve discussed previously, I used to use WordPress’ Press This bookmarklet for composing links, relying on a combination of CF Setter and Slugger+ for setting custom fields and URL slugs. For writing feature articles, I would start in Simplenote and eventually copy and paste into the WordPress dashboard when I was nearing a final draft.

This process was inefficient, at best, and has been supplanted by a more modern workflow that allows me to write entirely in Ulysses, regardless of what form that published work will take. This means I’ll have a familiar writing environment for everything I publish — going all-in on Markdown and building efficiencies from its consistency. It will also let me keep an archive of my writing in iCloud — accessible from Ulysses on all of my devices.

It’s worth mentioning that The Soulmen have announced that Ulysses will soon have native support for publishing to WordPress. I was initially worried that this would render my publishing workflow useless, but I’ve realized that there’s still a reason for its existence. Ulysses’ publishing mechanism might not have support for the features that I need if I’m going to use it full time. Support for custom fields, scheduled publishing, and custom URL slugs are all essential to me, but there’s no telling if they’ll exist at launch. And more importantly, we don’t know when the update will be released — I need to publish now.

The Workflow

This is, by far, the most complicated workflow I’ve ever built. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t credit Federico Viticci’s publishing workflow as an inspiration for my own. I originally designed two separate workflows — one for publishing links and another for publishing features articles. That is, until I came across Viticci’s. His asks which post type you’re publishing and performs a different set of actions based on the one you choose. This was a brilliant idea and allowed me to simplify Workflow’s action sheet without losing any functionality.

The workflow uses a few regular expressions to interact with text on the first and last line of the document. I wish I had the ability to write my own regular expressions, but it’s a little over my head at this point. I did manage to find the ones I needed in a Reddit thread and on Stephen Millard’s Thought Asylum. Without these, the workflow just wouldn’t be possible.

There’s several pieces of information that I needed to populate in the “Post to WordPress” action in Workflow — title, custom fields, post content, category, tags, and URL slug. The title, custom fields, and post content are saved as variables using the aforementioned regular expressions before being passed to the publishing action. The category is automatically set based on which post type is chosen at the beginning of the Workflow — Linked List or Feature.

Unfortunately, the current workflow asks for the URL slug and tags when it’s triggered. I would prefer those bits of information be automatically populated, but it wasn’t until a few days ago that I devised a way to do so. It’s all theory at this point — completely untested — but I hope I’ll be able to integrate it soon. The largest benefit to adding this feature is that both tags and URL slugs would be saved in Ulysses rather than only existing inside my WordPress database.

Push to WordPress is activated from the “Run Workflow” action extension, when viewing Ulysses’ export screen, and performs the following process:

• The entire document is saved as the variable “Note,” the first line is capitalized with title case, and saved as the variable “Title.”
• A menu appears asking whether your publishing a link or a feature article.
• If Linked List is chosen:
  • The first line — title — and last line — URL — are stripped from the document and the result is saved as the variable “Content”.
  • Workflow asks you to choose which URL you’d like placed in the custom field.
  • The post content, title, and custom field URL are passed to the “Post to WordPress” action and Workflow asks for the URL slug and tags.
  • The post is saved as a draft in your WordPress Dashboard which is then opened in Safari.
• If Feature is chosen:
  • The top line — title — is stripped from the document and passed to the “Post to WordPress” action.
  • Workflow asks for the URL slug and tags.
  • The post is saved as a draft in your WordPress Dashboard which is then opened in Safari.

I’ve only tested this Workflow in Ulysses, exporting HTML snippets — it does not work if you’re trying to export “full page”. I expect it will work with other text editors as well, as long as they’re able to export HTML. But there are a few more things to remember about the workflow:

• Push to WordPress always assumes that the title is on the first line — if anything else is on the first line, it will be stripped from the post content and treated as the title.
• If Linked List is chosen as the post type, the workflow assumes that the last line is the contents of your custom field.
• The workflow doesn’t actually publish the post, it only saves it as a draft. That way it can be previewed in the site’s design and scheduled to publish at a later date — most of what I publish is written a day or two before it goes live.

While it’s unlikely that anyone has the same setup as I do for publishing, I suspect there are plenty with similar needs. With that in mind, I think Push to WordPress is a perfect starting point for anyone who wants to hack together their own publishing workflow.

Chris Morran, writing for Consumerist:

That parenthetical was not added by us. This is an admission by Comcast that its data cap has absolutely nothing to do with easing the load on its network.

Instead, it’s — according to the script — about “Fairness and providing a more flexible policy to our customers.”

We’ll give you a second to wipe off your screen from the spit-take you might have just done while reading that.

The documents were originally leaked on 4Chan last week, but they have since been shared on Reddit by a user who managed to download them before the thread expired.

I wasn’t aware of this initiative until just a few days ago. There’s some heavy hitters on board, though — Reddit, DuckDuckGo, and Stack Exchange to name a few. But unfortunately, I don’t think it’s going to make a difference long term.