Best Hue App Mac
Step One: Set Up an Entertainment Area in Your Hue Mobile App. To set up an Entertainment Area, open up the mobile Hue app, and then tap the “Settings” tab in the lower-right corner of the screen. RELATED: How to Get the Most Out of Your Philips Hue Lights. Select “Entertainment Areas” from the list. Tap “Create Area” at the bottom. 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. An app called OneCast (will stream your xbox directly to your Mac's screen. If you have a decent connection and set the quality on OneCast to low, it will stream with very little lag. From there you just use Hue Sync as you would otherwise. Philips Hue Mac App. The best Mac app for Philips Hue is the Colors for Hue. It’s free and it does nearly everything you could ask a Hue controller to do. First, you have to pair the app as. The Hue Sync app works with every video-playing app, whether running as a desktop program or through your browser. For the best results, put the video player in full-screen mode. Sit back and enjoy the flick, with automatic colour syncing enabled, thanks to the screen monitoring tech built into the Hue Sync app and the settings you've configured. Hue White Color Ambiance lights are dimmable and adjust from warm white to cool white light, but you can also select from 16 million colors via the Hue app and a Bluetooth smartphone connection.
Philips Hue Sync is a great way to synchronise your lights with your PC or Mac for games, music and movies. If you use your PC or Mac for any of these, then the tool could be a great way to enhance your entertainment experiences.
If you remember my previous post - Philips Hue Entertainment Integration News - you'll know that Philips introduced an 'Entertainment' feature to help users synchronise their Hue lights to their entertainment experiences.
The idea is to create a two part solution for linking your entertainment hardware with Hue. This is a step up from the previous scenario. You'll remember from my other posts 'Discovering Philips Hue Movie Sync' & 'Discovering Philips Hue Music Sync', the only real options were to use third party apps, and the solutions were crude at best.
Part one sees the introduction of an 'entertainment' element within the Hue app and system. You use this to define one or more Entertainment Areas. These areas mark out where you've positioned your lights in a room, relative to where you sit, and where you might have your TV or screen positioned.
The second part relies on entertainment hardware makers getting on board. All they need to do is add Hue functionality to their products. Through this integration, you'll be able to connect your product to Hue, choose the appropriate entertainment area from any you might have defined, and then you can start taking advantage of synchronisation.
At launch, Philips had lined up a hardware partner; Razer (makers of the pro gamer line of products). However, Philips have now launched their own software to allow you to link your PC or Mac to their entertainment feature too.
The idea is simple. Load up the software, and Hue Sync will synchronise whatever is being displayed on your screen (or music playing) to your lights.
You'll first want to define an entertainment area in the Hue App on your phone. Head to settings, go to 'entertainment areas', then tap 'create entertainment area'. Hue will then walk you through the process of defining the entertainment area. The only odd thing here is that when you drag the lights around the representation of your seating area on screen, you aren't shown the name of each bulb. Instead you are reliant on the light itself flashing as you drag it.
Tip: after you have created your entertainment area, you can edit its name. This is especially useful if you plan to create more than one.
You can download the software from the Philips Hue website here. Installation is a simple next-next-finish affair. It's available for PCs running Windows 10, and Macs running Sierra / High Sierra.
When you run the software for the first time, it first needs to discover and connect to your Hue bridge, using the familiar process of first finding it, then requesting that you push the button on the front of the bridge to confirm the connection. This is a one time job. Then, you select your entertainment area as previously defined.
That's it! You're then shown the main control window. Here, you can choose between four different ways to control your lights; Scene, Games, Music and Video.
- 'Scene' is a way to activate the four basic White ambient light scenes built-in to Hue (Read, Relax, Concentrate, and Energise)
- 'Games' is appropriate for when you want to sync your lights with games played on your PC or Mac
- 'Music' lets you synchronise your PC or Mac audio with your lighting (and you get to choose from five different colour palettes for this)
- 'Video' is appropriate for when you plan to watch movies or TV shows.
For Games, Music and Video, you get to choose the 'intensity' of the sync - Subtle, Moderate, High and Intense. In addition, for Games and Video, you get to choose whether it's just the colours on your screen that are used to sync with the lights, or your audio too.
Hitting the 'Start Light Sync' button turns on the synchronisation process, which is immediate, and synchronises anything on your screen. However there is one dissapointing exception. Hue Sync can't 'see' protected content... that includes streaming services like Netflix, regardless of whether it's played through the app, or the browser.
Essentially services like Netflix have copy-protection enabled. It's designed to prevent people from 'ripping' a movie or TV show by simply using a screen-capture program. However that also blocks Hue Sync from detecting the colours, and doing it's job. Maybe this is something that can be fixed in time - however I suspect it would require some work on the part of the streaming services.
When trying a different source, the whole thing worked well. Lights around me synchronised with the colours on screen, and different lights were switching to different colours depending on where I had 'placed' them in my Entertainment area definition. Basically, with the exception of the above problem with protected content, it just works.
Of course, the holy grail of built-in integration with Smart TVs remains illusive. The only TV manufacturer that I'm aware of that does this is -of course- Philips.
For now though, the Hue Sync software (alongside the Entertainment feature) is a step forward, especially for those who use a computer as the primary way of enjoying entertainment. Gamers may love this especially.
If you try it, let me know what you think! I'll be keeping an eye on this software to see what new features get added over time!
One of the fantastic perks of Philips Hue lights is how many devices and apps can work with or enhance the functionality of them. The developer community is gigantic. One platform that’s a bit more sparse on Hue support is the Mac. Wouldn’t it be great if while already using your Mac, you didn’t need to reach over to your iPhone and launch an app to control the lights?
A few apps, most of which cost money, do exist for the Mac that can help out with this. But we’re going to focus on just one. It’s free and it has more features than even the official Philips Hue app for iOS supports.
Philips Hue Mac App
The best Mac app for Philips Hue is the Colors for Hue. Why? It’s free and it does nearly everything you could ask a Hue controller to do.
First, you have to pair the app as always with your Hue bridge. Launch Colors for Hue, then head over to wherever you put your bridge and press the center button to confirm the link.
Colors for Hue sits in your menu bar. If you click it, you’ll see a list of every light bulb connected to that bridge along with an indication of their current brightness level.
If you have Hue bulbs that support color, hovering over the name of your bulb will reveal an entire color palette to choose from. As for Hue bulbs that don’t support color, but just various color temperatures for white, you can adjust that here too using the slider. Since my bulbs are just pure white, I can only adjust the brightness from the main menu.
Grouping Lights
One the largest downsides to the official Philips Hue app is that it doesn’t support the grouping of several light bulbs into one control. Yes, you can set scenes that have brightness and color presets for all the light bulbs, but sometimes you just need a few grouped together.
For instance, my ceiling light is powered by three different lightbulbs. In the Philips Hue app, I’d have to control them either by turning on or off all the lights in the room (four for me total) or each lightbulb one by one.
Thankfully, in Colors for Hue, I’ve been able to group the three ceiling bulbs into a single Ceiling light. To do this, click Preferences in the menu then click Groups. Highlight the bulbs you want to group together by pressing either Command or Shift.
Tip: It helps if you give your lights specific names that can aid you in remembering which ones they are within the room, rather than just keeping them in default numerical order.Click Group and you’re done. Now, the brightness slider in Colors for Hue controls all three bulbs on the ceiling at once.
Delayed Off
Colors for Hue also supports Delayed Off, which is basically a sleep timer for your lights. Hover over the light or group of lights you want to set a delay for, then in the secondary menu hover over Delayed Off. Choose which amount of time you want to keep the lights on for before they automatically shut off.
Tip: Preferences has an optional setting for slow dimming. This will dim the lights slowly before they go off instead of abruptly going dark. Select Slow Dimming for Delayed Off to enable this.Colors for Hue is available from the Mac App Store.
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