In one of my previous blogs, I wrote a full user review about iConnectHue. But luckily iConnectHue keeps updating their app to provide all the newest features to their users immediately. As soon as new Philips Hue products appear on the market, they are directly added to the iConnectHue app. This time Philips Hue updated their API to v2 which allows users to play with gradient lights through their API. In this blog, I will discuss everything that is new in ConnectHue 4.8.
TL;DR
- Gradient support
- Halloween animations
- Apple Family Sharing for Pro
- New motion sensor supported
- Additional improvements
So let’s get into the content of the actual updates
iConnectHue support for gradient lights
The iConnectHue app is meant for users that want to get the most out of their Hue lights. With the new version 4.8, a great new feature is being added to the app. This new version adds support for all Hue gradient lights like the gradient light strip. You now have the option to add magic scenes to your gradient lights with just one tap. In addition, this new gradient feature can be combined with all other features of the app like enabling your gradient lights after a timer has passed or when you come home for example. Even the drag & drop functionality of gradient lights works super smoothly. What is really nice is that you can also use this feature as a widget.
But it must be said that there are still a couple of features missing or buggy. This is mainly because Hue doesn’t support it yet. It’s for example not yet possible to use the gradient lights remotely and the fade still doesn’t work. Both features will probably be fixed very soon.
Halloween animations
Lots of people liked the Halloween animations which were included in the app. This made the developers of iConnectHue decide to let everybody use it until mid-December and make keep it available for Pro members for the full year. It’s up to you to decide whether or not you want to become a pro-member of course.
Apple Family Sharing
From now on you can share your Pro membership easily via Apple Family Sharing. As consequence, the old sharing via Airdrop is not available any longer. If you haven’t set up family sharing yet, I would like to refer you to their FAQ on how to do it!
Additional improvements
Besides the features mentioned above many -about 400 changes- more additional changes are added to iConnectHue with the release of v4.8. Some important ones include:
- Improvements to Animation, Magic scene and timer editor
- Improvements to color selection pages
- Several menus improved or reworked
- Several views slightly reworked
- Resolved several small problems
Thanks for the report, Koen! Be assured we already have new cool things in the pipeline š