The newest and best Philips Hue app for Windows 10, mobile and Xbox One. Now featuring Hue Disco, Screen Sync and advanced Hue Dimmer and Tap programming! Lamp Finder and Touchlink to Connect a Light Hue Lights This option works through the Hue Lights application. The Touchlink option is currently only built into an IOS application, if you have an droid device you will have to use Lamp Finder on a PC or MAC.
- Mac OS 10.9 (Lion) or higher, Intel 64. For 10.7 & 10.8 (Lion & Mountain Lion) you could try version v2.0.2; Philips Hue bulbs and their 'Bridge' required (all part of their starter pack) For all features to work properly, Bridge's firmware must be up to date (free and easy to do).
- Hue Sync 1.3.4.3. We regularly update your Hue Sync Desktop app to improve the performance and reliability of the system. August 9, 2019. Hue Sync 1.3. Improved overall experience based on height of the lights (setup done in Philips Hue main app).
I've been testing HomeKit accessories since the first wave premiered earlier this year, and I've used a variety of apps to set them up and control them. Most manufacturers have released device-specific apps, but if you have a few different HomeKit items and need a central hub, there's no better app out there right now than Home.
Wait, what's HomeKit and why do I need a third-party app?
HomeKit, Apple's Siri-integrated answer to home automation, has been available for manufacturers to hook into since 2014. For a device to be HomeKit-compatible, it has to be approved by Apple's MFi program, which means special certification and confirmation that the devices are using secure pathways to safely pass your information from home automation items to iCloud.
Your iCloud account is how you register HomeKit items to your home: When you create a database for your house, it's linked to your account; you can give other iCloud users guest access, but your account (and your account alone) is in charge of the house.
Within this database, you can add HomeKit accessories from any manufacturer, and set up those accessories in specific rooms, zones (groupings of rooms), or scenes (groupings of accessories that might be time- or situation-based). There's one catch: You can't do any of this without a third-party app.
Yes, despite this very iOS-centric registration scheme, your iPhone or iPad has no official HomeKit app where you can view and control accessories: Instead, it punts you to apps from various third-party HomeKit manufacturers. And given that most home automation manufacturers are largely hardware-focused, that means—yes—cruddy software.
Philips' Hue app only lets you set up Hue accessories, but has no way to assign your lights to rooms or zones, and their only actionable scenes are geofence-triggered. Lutron's Caseta Wireless app won't launch half of the time if it can't connect to the online Caseta system (the custom home automation service Lutron used prior to HomeKit).
Elgato's Eve app is better than most in that it shows all your HomeKit accessories and lets you add rooms, zones, and scenes, but scrolling feels sluggish and the app is prone to random quits.
So what to do if you have multiple HomeKit services and want an app to quickly view and use them all?
The Home app to the rescue
Home is Mattias Hochgatterer's $15 all-purpose HomeKit control application, and it is worth every penny and then some. This app is the program Apple should have shipped with iOS 9: Though rough around a few edges, it cleanly and clearly helps you see all your HomeKit items at a glance, add new items, assign them to rooms and zones, and configure scenes and triggers. About the only thing I don't like about Home is its name—it's almost impossible to recommend to people without having the full App Store URL on hand.
The initial sell, for me, was easy room and zone organization. As I mention above, Elgato's Eve app can do this for any and all of your accessories, but it's a little clunky at present and crashes more than I'd like. With the Home app, you can jump from your overview to Rooms and Zones with just a tap of a tab. From there, you can add and edit rooms and zones themselves, add or remove accessories, and control all your items.
Scenes and Triggers were what really sold me on the app, however: With these, you can set either Siri command-triggered, time-triggered, or action-triggered scenes. These can involve any HomeKit-connected accessory, and you can set them to any state you wish.
For fun, when first testing scenes, I created a scene called 'Emergency alert'. This includes all my Hue lights—three in the office, three in the living room—as well as my living room Lutron lights. When I say that phrase to Siri, the Lutron lights switch off, and all our other lights immediately turn blood red. (Who needs Halloween decorations when your lights can do the work for you?) I also created a 'Simulation complete' scene that resets all my lights to white—mostly because it feels oh-so-very Star Trek.
Triggers is also new with iOS 9: It lets you do 'if-this-then-that'-style scenes that activate automatically upon a certain event.
At their most basic, you can trigger accessories to turn on or off at certain times of day—add a time trigger to 'turn on the lights in the living room at 5PM', for example.
But triggers can be infinitely more complex. If you have motion or door sensors, you can add a trigger to turn accessories on or off at door open or when the motion sensor is activated; when you're leaving or arriving at a certain place; and you can change the color of your lights as the temperature rises or drops. It's a lot of fun, and if you enjoy IFTTT-style actions, you'll love messing around with Triggers.
The triggers interface is perhaps the least polished of the app (it's also the most recently added feature): You can stumble your way through setting up triggers pretty easily, but the actual documentation on doing so is a little obtuse, and it's not super-clear at first how to save a characteristic. (To do so, after selecting 'Characteristic,' you select the accessory in question and change something about it, but then you have to press Done in the upper left corner—there's no Save button.) It's much less straightforward than the other sections of the app, to my disappointment. I also wouldn't mind a way to switch from Celsius to Fahrenheit in viewing temperatures.
That said, the developer appears to be pretty active at fixing and tweaking the app, and I'm hopeful to see a slightly more polished version of Triggers in the next update.
Siri integration
When paired with a HomeKit home, Siri can recognize a variety of commands:
- Accessory names: 'Turn off the Hue office lightstrip.'
- Room and Zones: 'Turn off the lights in the office' or 'Turn off the lights upstairs'
- Scenes: 'Emergency alert!' or 'Set the 'emergency alert' scene'
- Individual accessory tweaking: 'Set the lights to 50 percent' or 'Set the office lights to green' or 'Set the temperature to 67'
You can rename accessories, rooms, zones, and scenes from the Home app; they'll take a few moments to propgate before reaching iCloud and your Siri connection. Unfortunately, Siri's still a bit twitchy when it comes to scene names: I can say 'Simulation complete' with no problem, but she won't activate other scenes ('Enter the nexus!' being one) no matter what I try. It's odd, and I'm chalking it up to early HomeKit bugs and bedevilry.
Bottom line
If you have HomeKit accessories with a terrible companion app or multiple HomeKit manufacturers in your home, you need the Home app. Flat out, it's the best way to coordinate and organize your iOS home automation needs, and I hope Apple takes note, too.
In my opinion, there are few reasons not to have an optionally-viewable Home app in iOS (the same way you have an optionally-viewable iCloud Drive app) for those with HomeKit accessories installed. It would save every manufacturer the work of having to incorporate rooms and zones information into their app, and provide users with easy controls for their accessories in one place.
But until Apple gets its act together in this arena, there's the Home app to pick up the slack. And it's doing so with aplomb.
HomeKit
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if only you knew the power of the dark side...Apple doubles trade-in value of select Android devices for a limited time
Apple has quietly upped the trade-in price of several Android smartphones for a limited time, doubling the value of some handsets.
![Für Für](/uploads/1/2/6/4/126466499/720922910.jpg)
Follow 3 Easy Steps
Step 1
First make sure your bridge is connected to your network and is functioning properly. Test that the smartphone app can control the lights on the same network.
Step 2
Then you need to discover the IP address of the bridge on your network. You can do this in a few ways.
NOTE – When you are ready to make a production app, you need to discover the bridge automatically using Hue Bridge Discovery Guide.
1. Use a UPnP discovery app to find Philips hue in your network.
2. Use our broker server discover process by visiting https://discovery.meethue.com
3. Log into your wireless router and look Philips hue up in the DHCP table.
4. Hue App method: Download the official Philips hue app. Connect your phone to the network the hue bridge is on. Start the hue app(iOS described here). Push link connect to the bridge. Use the app to find the bridge and try controlling lights. All working — Go to the settings menu in the app. Go to My Bridge. Go to Network settings. Switch off the DHCP toggle. The ip address of the bridge will show. Note the ip address, then switch DHCP back on
2. Use our broker server discover process by visiting https://discovery.meethue.com
3. Log into your wireless router and look Philips hue up in the DHCP table.
4. Hue App method: Download the official Philips hue app. Connect your phone to the network the hue bridge is on. Start the hue app(iOS described here). Push link connect to the bridge. Use the app to find the bridge and try controlling lights. All working — Go to the settings menu in the app. Go to My Bridge. Go to Network settings. Switch off the DHCP toggle. The ip address of the bridge will show. Note the ip address, then switch DHCP back on
Step 3
Once you have the address load the test app by visiting the following address in your web browser.
https://<bridge ip address>/debug/clip.html
You should see an interface like this.
Using this debugger utility you can populate the components of an HTTPS call – the basis of all web traffic and of the hue RESTful interface.
1. URL: this is actually the local address of a specific resource (thing) inside the hue system. It could be light, a group of lights or many more things. This is the object you’ll be interacting with in this command.
2. A body: this is the part of the message which describes what you want to change and how. Here you enter, in JSON format, the resource name and value you’d like to change/add.
3. A method: here you have a choice of the 4 HTTPS methods the hue call can use.
GET: this is the command to fetch all information about the addressed resource
PUT: this is the command to modify an addressed resource
POST: this is the command to create a new resource inside the addressed resource
DELETE: this is the command to deleted the addressed resource
4. Response: In this area you’ll see the response to your command. Also in JSON format.
3. A method: here you have a choice of the 4 HTTPS methods the hue call can use.
GET: this is the command to fetch all information about the addressed resource
PUT: this is the command to modify an addressed resource
POST: this is the command to create a new resource inside the addressed resource
DELETE: this is the command to deleted the addressed resource
4. Response: In this area you’ll see the response to your command. Also in JSON format.
So let’s get started…
First let’s do a very simple command and get information about your hue system.
Fill in the details below leaving the body box empty and press the
GET
button.URL | /api/newdeveloper |
Method | GET |
You should see a response like below:
Congratulations you’ve just sent you first CLIP command!
Now this is the command to fetch all information in the bridge. You didn’t get much back and that’s because you’re using an unauthorized username “newdeveloper”.
We need to use the randomly generated username that the bridge creates for you. Fill in the info below and press the POST button.
Philips Hue App For Mac
URL | /api |
Body | {'devicetype':'my_hue_app#iphone peter'} |
Method | POST |
This command is basically saying please create a new resource inside /api (where usernames sit) with the following properties.
When you press the POST button you should get back an error message letting you know that you have to press the link button. This is our security step so that only apps you want to control your lights can. By pressing the button we prove that the user has physical access to the bridge.
Go and press the button on the bridge and then press the
POST
button again and you should get a success response like below.Congratulations you’ve just created an authorized user
(1028d66426293e821ecfd9ef1a0731df)
, which we’ll use from now on! Now if you do the first GET command again you should get a whole lot more information about what lights you have and their states. This data is all in JSON format so can be easily processed by your applications.Turning a light on and off
Okay now that we have a username with permission to use the system lets start having some fun.
Each light has its own URL. You can see what lights you have with the following command:
Address | https://<bridge ip address>/api/1028d66426293e821ecfd9ef1a0731df/lights |
Method | GET |
You should get a JSON response with all the lights in your system and their names.
Now let’s get information about a specific light. The light with id 1.
Address | https://<bridge ip address>/api/1028d66426293e821ecfd9ef1a0731df/lights/1 |
Method | GET |
In this response you can see all of the resources this light has. The most interesting ones are inside the state object as these are the ones we’ll have to interact with to control the light.
Lets’ start with the “on” attribute. This is a very simple attribute that can have 2 values: true and false. So let’s try turning the light off.
Address | https://<bridge ip address>/api/1028d66426293e821ecfd9ef1a0731df/lights/1/state |
Body | {'on':false} |
Method | PUT |
Philips Hue App For Macbook
Looking at the command you are sending we’re addressing the “state” object of light one and telling it to modify the “on” value inside it to false (or off). When you press the
PUT
button the light should turn off. Change the value in the body to true and the light will turn on again.Now let’s do something a bit more fun and start changing some colors. Enter the command below.
Address | https://<bridge ip address>/api/1028d66426293e821ecfd9ef1a0731df/lights/1/state |
Body | {'on':true, 'sat':254, 'bri':254,'hue':10000} |
Method | PUT |
Philips Hue Mac App
We’re interacting with the same “state” attributes here but now we’re modifying a couple more attributes. We’re making sure the light is on by setting the “on” resource to true. We’re also making sure the saturation (intensity) of the colors and the brightness is at its maximum by setting the “sat” and “bri” resources to 254. Finally we’re telling the system to set the “hue” (a measure of color) to 10000 points (hue runs from 0 to 65535). Try changing the hue value and keep pressing the
PUT
button and see the colour of your light changing running through different colors.Philips Hue Sync App For Mac
Now you understand the basics of the commands you can send to hue through this tool – but we can also send the commands as part of an app. Intrigued now? Read more at Core Concepts (developer account required).