Hue Widget

Hue Widget provides a quick, efficient way to manage turning your Hue Lights on and off.

One of the things we’ve been trying to do around our house within the past year is to make it more automated. In order to do so, we’ve installed several Phillips Hue light bulbs and Friends of Hue parts including LightStrips and the Bloom. I want to start by saying that I really enjoy having lights we can control with our phones. The problem for me is speed. As wonderful as the smart lights are, you still have to control them with an app. And unlocking your phone, opening the app and sliding the level bars side-to-side is not as fast as an on/off wall switch.. Fortunately, developer Marcel Dittman has taken advantage of being about to code widgets for the iOS Notification Center and created Hue Widget.

Hue Widget is a wonderful little app (only takes up 7.7MB) that allows you to turn your Hue Lights on and off with a few taps. The best part about this app is that it’s actually a widget for your Notifcation Center. So, you can now turn groups of lights on and off from your Notification Center. It’s brilliant! This is something I’ve been longing for since we installed all our Hue Lights. I find myself just flipping the switch most of the time because the native Hue app just takes too long. Now, I can turn off groups of lights – like the three we have in the bedroom – with just a few taps. It’s wonderful!

Hue Widget is a very clean-cut app/widget. Not a lot of bells and whistles, just function. There are a couple of things I’ve noticed from using it though. First, Hue Widget saves the last state of your Hue Lights and restores that when you power them on the next time. This is a nice touch because it can take a long time to fine-tune your settings on Hue Bulbs. Also, we discovered that once one user on your Hue system sets up groups, it’s available to any user on your Hue system. For example, my fiance set up the groups of lights by room and when I installed Hue Widget and connected to our Hue Hub, all of those presets automatically loaded to my widget and app. This is a nice touch from the developer as it seems that the app communicates really well with the Hue Hub.

Because Hue Widget is designed to work with the Notification Center widgets, this app is only available for users who have iOS 8 or higher. Hue Widget was most recently update October 29 and is currently on version 1.3. The app is optimized for iPhone 5, 6 and 6 Plus. Hue Widget can be purchased for $0.99 and is available in the App Store.

For more information, visit blowfishlab.de/HueWidget.