Apple Home

Episode #179   As promised last week, here's my first look at HomeKit, Apple’s framework for securely controlling smart home products with your iPhone or other device. In a nutshell, HomeKit lets you control smart home products from a multitude of manufacturers using an iOS app or Siri. HomeKit enables such magic using, “scenes,” which…

Apple updates iPhone 6s and 6 Plus with Bluetooth 4.2 Apple quietly updated the Bluetooth chips in last year's iPhone presumably when this year's iPhone 6s and 6s Plus shipped. The company didn't mention the change, although it does show up on Apple's iPhone family comparison Web page. Unlike Bluetooth 4.1, which was a firmware…

Philips Hue HomeKit compatible Bridge coming soon and it'll cost about $60 The online listing for the new Bridge was first spotted by iCulture. The retailer has since pulled it from their site and Philips isn't talking yet about the new product. The new Hue Bridge will be compatible with all of the Philips Hue…

Lutron Caseta Wireless Dimmer Switch So where do I draw the line? How do I decide which switches will become 'the chosen ones'? The deciding factor for me came down to answering a simple question: how long will a light remain on?  What does that mean? Well, for example, my hallway light is on probably…

Philips Hue I've talked about why Philips Hue lights are a good idea, and the biggest reason is because it's easy. Basically you plug everything in, download an app, and you're ready to go. There's even an option in the official app (as well as an IFTTT action) for having the lights automatically come on.…

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Here are three of those scenarios: Scenario 1: Switches and lights coming on when i get home when its dark The first time I realized home automation could improve my life was when I noticed my girlfriend (now wife) struggling to get in our apartment after coming home from work one particularly snowy winter evening.…

Amazon Dash turns your home into an online ordering tool The just launched program lets Amazon Prime subscribers pick up three of the key fob-size buttons so they can order items like laundry detergent, razor blades, and diapers without making a trip to their computer or having to pull their smartphone out of their pocket.…

There are others from companies such as Wink and WeMo, and most of the same concepts apply to these bulbs. Primarily you see two styles of bulbs: the “Hue” bulb which can be adjusted to a variety of colors, and the Hue Lux which is a white bulb that only has brightness adjustments. (Wink and…

Here's how it works: There's this Wink app, that's free in the iTunes App Store, which you can use to connect to a variety of devices like Honeywell thermostats and Schlage door locks. For things that don't fall in the “Ready to go” category, there's a Wink Hub which will communicate to those devices, like…

Petcube consists of two components. The first, which is available now, is the free PetCube iOS application. It will let you share photos of your pet, open to likes and comments from other members of the community. You can also follow new friends and their pets, and get updates when they post new content. The final feature, Play, requires…

Here’s the thing, though—how do you keep media synced between computers? Once you’ve pulled music from your wife’s Mac, say, to yours, how do you make sure that anything she buys from now on is on your Mac, too? Here’s an easy way to do it. First, set up Home Sharing with the steps outlined…

Another issue has been that the industry tends to work together on standards, hash out issues, and obtain a sense of where certain technologies are going. Sometimes, becoming embroiled in issues like that can hold Apple back. Or distract them from a prudent focus. As a result, Apple would be conspicuously absent from many of…

Nest Learning Thermostat That’s the Nest Learning Thermostat, and if the still doesn’t do it for you, skip to the video at the end of the article. The company, Nest Labs, announced the product Tuesday, describing it as a device that never stops learning from your behavior, increasing efficiency all the while. In essence, the…

I was very interested to learn that a company right here in Austin, TX has invented a transceiver and an app that allows anyone to use iOS devices running iOS 4.3 or later to turn the touch screens into remote controls. The free app is Control It All Remote. It works with a transceiver that is…

The first thing you need to know is that Rosetta is a very small piece of code, about 2.1 MB. It’s not at all like the Classic environment of old, so any obsession with eradicating it from your system is unwarranted. It just waits in stand-by mode and is only invoked when a native PPC…

What you will need: a two computers, PC or Mac, iTunes 9, and an iTunes Store account. In the days before iTunes 9, we could share music or videos to another computer on the home network — one that’s also one of the five allowed to be authorized. You’d set this up in iTunes preferences…