New in iConnectHue 5.5
This update is more or less 2-3 big updates in one – we’re proud to present the best Home Widget available for Hue, and if this wasn’t enough, we’ve extended Siri Shortcuts by quite an extent. In detail:
Home Widgets
We now support Home Widgets – one small and one medium with the 2024 upgrade, or any number and large widgets via a Membership. Every action the old widget could do is also possible with Home Widgets – and more!
We’ve polished the way you can add new things to your widget. You can access your list of widgets now directly from iConnectHue’s menu, and create new ones, or, with a Membership, also duplicate existing ones and share them to a family member.
The way Home Widgets work is vastly different from the old widgets – they won’t always show the latest state. But still, iConnectHue will always switch right. Opening the app or pressing the reload button in the middle will update them instantly.
(Available for every Member or w/ 2024 upgrade)
Pro Members will welcome the Multi Action Item – put up to 4 actions for the same group into it and step through them, like with the Hue Dimmer Hue button. This saves up to 75% space, and allows you complex actions even in a small widget.
Note: If the old or new widgets don’t appear, please restart your iOS device. This is a bug in iOS. Also note that the classic widget is marked as “deprecated” since multiple years by Apple. It might happen that it will disappear with a future iOS update. Home Widgets require iOS 17.
Siri Shortcuts
You can now create and edit shortcuts in the shortcuts app directly – with nice lists of what you can do and where.
The old way of doing things in the app and adding them as shortcut afterwards isn’t available any longer, but you can still create shortcuts within iConnectHue via its menu.
(Available for every Member or w/ 2024 upgrade)
Note: If you get the error that something went wrong in the shortcuts app, please restart your device. This is a bug in iOS.
In addition to this, Pro Members get a new selection of possible shortcuts and actions:
- Change brightness of a group
- Toggle a Motion Sensor, Contact Sensor
- Turn a group on in 2 hour sun-adjusting daylight mode
- Set the color of a group via color code (see our Copy & Paste tutorial for possible codes)
On our own behalf: Memberships help all of us
First off, thank you for using iConnectHue, and supporting us via any way possible – either by your positive reviews, your feedback, by being an active Member or by purchasing something.
We’re a small team that cares about you, your questions and about iConnectHue every day. Memberships help us tremendously to get our work paid and the app up to date – without them, iConnectHue wouldn’t exist in this form any longer.
If you are no member yet, please consider taking a Membership. If you are, thank you for taking it, and for keeping it. If you’re missing something, let us know, so we can consider it for future updates.
Complications
We usually won’t do this, but we’ve run into an exception… this update was really complicated to do, and we had to circumvent several problems with iOS, and Apple’s developer tool XCode. Our work on this update created almost 20 (!) bug reports to Apple, suggestions and reported problems around iOS 17 and XCode 15, which, in sum, slowed down our work substantially. This update could have been available last year and, in sum, 1-2 months earlier, tough we’re happy to bring it to you finally.
We’ve done our best to make everything work the best way possible. If our widgets are not showing up with the update, or you cannot select something in the Shortcuts app, please restart your device – these are some of the bugs in iOS.
If you run into any problem, please let us know so we can take care of it. Thank you!
Other detail improvements
- Try out the new things without purchase; Running new shortcuts and using Home Widgets though requires the appropriate purchase
- Toggle the Contact Sensor on/off from any widget (2024 upgrade)
- Pro: Improved color pasting can also pass brightness (see our Copy & Paste tutorial for possible codes)
- Contact sensor open state indicated via icon in device list
- Added support for new light types
- Several detail improvements – finders, keepers
- Fixes and stability improvements – yes, we also do that…
Note that some things might only be available in iOS 17, and we strongly recommend to update to the latest iOS version for everything to work properly.