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We have our whole house on Hue bulbs and use Eve and hue mote to do what we need since the Hue app was so crappy. I'm not learning a new app now. Eve is what the first party app should have been at launch.
 
We have our whole house on Hue bulbs and use Eve and hue mote to do what we need since the Hue app was so crappy. I'm not learning a new app now. Eve is what the first party app should have been at launch.


How do you get on with the Eve app? I downloaded it, had a look and closed it again, it looked a little daunting. I'm getting a load of remote sockets to control stuff that I just want to go on/off, I know the Eve app can control sockets too and I believe build that into scenes (or whatever it calls them) - is that correct?

I like the Huemote app for its simplicity, and I'm starting to use iConnectHue but again that's a bigger learning curve, and the instructions are not the clearest. I've used dozens of apps, so many are not worth even keeping on my phone though, and others are just gimmicky - no developers, I don't need to pretend my house is on fire or have a police car stuck in the living room, I want to control my lights really really easily and intuitively!
 
There is no way to turn everything off from the widget, you would have to add 1 button for every 4 rooms.

I can't find a way to do that either. With the V1 app I had a "scene" that was set to run off all lights set as a widget and I can't find a way to do that with the new V2 app yet. Also, I notice you can no longer sync scenes between devices or to the my hue web site. I have gone back to the V1 app for the better widget/scene support for now.

@MillieWales thanks for the Huemote suggestion. Looking it over now and it seems promising.
 
@MillieWales thanks for the Huemote suggestion. Looking it over now and it seems promising.



My pleasure, I say it a lot but it's a great little app. I think because it's free and doesn't make your house flash like a Christmas tree people think it's not a good app, actually it does a couple of things really well. I like that I can easily change the order of lights, rooms and scenes by simply tapping 'edit' on each of those 3 screens and sliding the item up and down the screen, just as we are used to doing in other apps. Nothing clever or fancy, it just allows us to control our lights.
 
How do you get on with the Eve app? I downloaded it, had a look and closed it again, it looked a little daunting. I'm getting a load of remote sockets to control stuff that I just want to go on/off, I know the Eve app can control sockets too and I believe build that into scenes (or whatever it calls them) - is that correct?

I like the Huemote app for its simplicity, and I'm starting to use iConnectHue but again that's a bigger learning curve, and the instructions are not the clearest. I've used dozens of apps, so many are not worth even keeping on my phone though, and others are just gimmicky - no developers, I don't need to pretend my house is on fire or have a police car stuck in the living room, I want to control my lights really really easily and intuitively!


It has a little bit of a learning curve but the amount of control it gives you demands that. You can set groups, rooms, zones even automations which are like scenes but more detailed. You can control sockets as well. Groups are vital to proper control of the lights, something I was dumbfounded to find was missing from the Hue app.
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My pleasure, I say it a lot but it's a great little app. I think because it's free and doesn't make your house flash like a Christmas tree people think it's not a good app, actually it does a couple of things really well. I like that I can easily change the order of lights, rooms and scenes by simply tapping 'edit' on each of those 3 screens and sliding the item up and down the screen, just as we are used to doing in other apps. Nothing clever or fancy, it just allows us to control our lights.

My wife has given up on Siri commands for the huemote widget and Apple Watch app almost exclusively. It's that simple. The only issue is having two users control one bridge can confuse things.
 
I'm looking forward to someday getting a Hue White that simply lets you switch from warm white to neutral to cooler daylight, is dimmable, and costs $10/each or less. Then, much like Night Shift mode on iOS, my bulbs could gradually get warmer in the evening. It could even be programmed to stay daylight for a few hours after sunset in the winter to help mitigate seasonal disorders.

We did our first round of house showings last night, and these newer (and bigger) houses have tons of bulbs. Would probably be thousands of dollars to do just the basic Hue Whites on Amazon that are $15/bulb. I guess not every fixture needs a Hue, like bathrooms, although it would be kinda weird to have your living space set to daylight and you go into your bathroom and it's a lot warmer. Maybe just start with living room, kitchen and master bedroom. The downstairs is all for the daycare, so we probably wouldn't need to cover that.

That reminds me—can anyone recommend a good door lock that can be unlocked with an iPhone or maybe fobs or codes at certain times of day? So our daycare is going to be downstairs, but parents will have to come in upstairs. My wife would like to be able to remotely lock and unlock the door upstairs to let parents in. It would be ideal if they could have a key fob, perhaps RFID (or a key code), that just locks and unlocks the door when they come in during a specific time of day, say 7:15-5:45 M-F? If it uses a code, it would be nice if it auto-locked after a specific time period. Thanks!
 
I love my Hues, but the use of all that blue and green in the app screenshots is really disingenuous. Hue bulbs can't do those colours at all. (Maybe the lightstrips can?)

iConnectHue is smart enough to show the bulb's colour gamut on its selection wheel. Doesn't stop me from messing around hoping to finally find where the blue is.

iConnectHue-2.jpg


Thanks for the info, I was just about to invest in a host of Hue products. After googling around a bit I found out that this is not a shortcoming per se and is intentional. Philips wanted to categorize their lamp series into two categories: functional and ambience. Their advertisement is too generic for a potential customer to understand this at first.

The functional bulbs use RB LEDs to recreate a wide range of light shades that apparently appear 'natural', while the ambience ones use RGB LEDs, to 'paint' with light. These lamps (namely Bloom, Iris and LightStrip) can accurately produce green, cyan, turquoise. All in all, Philips would like you to invest in some of both. :)
 
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How are you getting to the scene page? I'm having a lot of trouble finding it. In addition I can't see any of my old scenes.
 
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So, many of my scenes incorporate bulbs from multiple rooms. The old app has a scenes section where I can click on a scene and lights in my living room AND my office adjust.

With this new app, which I am really disliking so far, it seems that a scene now only controls lights from the 1 room that scene is associated with. That seems contradictory to how most people have their scenes set up. Am I missing something?

As well, I tried to delete a scene I'd created and it won't go away. I click the "X" and it just stays there.

For me this Gen 2 app gets just about everything wrong.
 
How are you getting to the scene page? I'm having a lot of trouble finding it. In addition I can't see any of my old scenes.
You have to make a "room" first, then click on that room and you can then click the plus at the lower right to make a scene. From that same room screen you can see the scenes button on the bottom.

Your old scenes are not imported, not are they synced like the old app. If you scroll down at this link there is a FAQ that explains how to make new scenes.

http://www2.meethue.com/en-us/philipshueapp
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With this new app, which I am really disliking so far, it seems that a scene now only controls lights from the 1 room that scene is associated with. That seems contradictory to how most people have their scenes set up. Am I missing something?

I can't figure out a way around this limitation either and have gone back to the old app.
 
So, many of my scenes incorporate bulbs from multiple rooms. The old app has a scenes section where I can click on a scene and lights in my living room AND my office adjust.

With this new app, which I am really disliking so far, it seems that a scene now only controls lights from the 1 room that scene is associated with. That seems contradictory to how most people have their scenes set up. Am I missing something?

As well, I tried to delete a scene I'd created and it won't go away. I click the "X" and it just stays there.

For me this Gen 2 app gets just about everything wrong.


No you are not missing anything, Scenes are now per room - within each room you can choose the lights or you can choose the scene.

The only workaround (and it's very clumsy) is to set the scene for each room, then set a schedule and within the schedule you choose the rooms you want included and the scenes you want selected. Then at the scheduled time the lights do their thing.

That's not a lot of use when you want to change the scene throughout the house and there isn't a schedule about to make that change.

Use Huemote, it does what you want, it's free, no learning curve, you will love it.
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How are you getting to the scene page? I'm having a lot of trouble finding it. In addition I can't see any of my old scenes.


In each room at the bottom you can choose lights or scenes.
 
I guess I'll try the new Hue app. Sounds like it's not as good as I was hoping it was going to be. I mostly use Huemote which is very easy. I have about 20 white plus 8 color, 18' of strip LED and a Go spread over 3 levels in the house. Also a couple of their dimmer switches which I really like. Also use Siri but find it doesn't recognize "red". Siri will turn lights to other colors but when I say "turn lights to red" it can't locate lights. I need to say "turn lights to scarlet" and Siri will change them to red saying "the closest I could find is Ferrari red" but doesn't recognize "change lights to Ferrari red". Another problem I have with Siri is I can't remember all the names I've given the bulbs since some don't get used regularly. Overall I'm very happy with the lights. I like having the house lights red if I need to let my old lab out in the middle of the night. Also changing the shower lights to different colors is cool. Or just turning on/off all the lights at once is great. Wish the white bulbs would have the ability to change color temperature which would be nice over the vanity in the bathroom.
 
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For those still looking, be sure to search for "Philips Hue gen 2". Wish they would've just updated the existing app instead of forcing us to download a new one.
 
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......Overall I'm very happy with the lights. I like having the house lights red if I need to let my old lab out in the middle of the night. Also changing the shower lights to different colors is cool. Or just turning on/off all the lights at once is great. Wish the white bulbs would have the ability to change color temperature which would be nice over the vanity in the bathroom.

That's funny, I have lights that come on when my wife is on an early start, set to a very dim red, so she can see but it doesn't disturb me. She thought it was strange but I find you can see well and it doesn't make things look too odd, having blue or other colours can make it hard to see.

You may not like the new app as you have lots of bulbs like me, give it a try but isn't what I think it can and should be.

That said, this way it doesn't take users away from the fab Huemote or other apps!
 
There is no way to turn everything off from the widget, you would have to add 1 button for every 4 rooms.
You can tell Siri to "Turn lights off" or "Turn lights on". I'm having trouble getting Siri voice response to control a single room or scene.
 
You can tell Siri to "Turn lights off" or "Turn lights on". I'm having trouble getting Siri voice response to control a single room or scene.

Make sure the scene is added to Siri voice control in settings in hue app. I have a couple bulbs in shower. I say "set shower" and bulbs turn on. Another scene is shower off so I say "set shower off" and lights turn off. From there I can say "set shower 50%" etc to dim.

The dimmer switches work really well. You can add as many lights as you want to control to the switch which is basically a small remote attached to plate by magnets. You get on/off and dim up/down. For $25 I think it's reasonably priced.
 
I've been mulling over getting some of these lights in my house. My kids would love them!

They are very addictive, I've spent thousands on them. I sometimes try to justify it as saving money on replacing blown bulbs - we live in a 400 year old cottage and standard bulbs would blow every single day due to the wiring. But in reality I just say I like how they make my home look and feel and everyone thinks the house looks better for the lighting. They are fun to play with for a few hours, disco scenes and the house on fire, I do like some of the animated scenes like the weather with the clouds passing over, but once you've got that out of your system it's just nice to have the house lit well. We now have all the rooms decorated fairly neutrally and we do indeed 'paint with colour' - no need to redecorate every time you want a change, you can change the room colour in a second.

One really useful tip, my eldest son's room is at the far end of the house, if I try and call him he can't hear me so I have to go up to him. I used to text him but he never looks at his phone, now I have a button programmed saved on a Hue Tap switch that I touch and his bedroom flashes red, he knows when to come!
 
I can't find a way to do that either. With the V1 app I had a "scene" that was set to run off all lights set as a widget and I can't find a way to do that with the new V2 app yet. Also, I notice you can no longer sync scenes between devices or to the my hue web site. I have gone back to the V1 app for the better widget/scene support for now.

@MillieWales thanks for the Huemote suggestion. Looking it over now and it seems promising.

You can switch a maximum of four rooms off in one go, but not "All Lights" fortunately I only have two rooms
 
The bulbs aren't RGB, they are red/orange, lime green, and blue/violet. These produce great simulations of daylight and incandescent bulbs, and vivid warm colours, but the downside is that there's not enough saturation in the green and too much violet in the blue to sufficiently represent anything between pure yellow and pure blue on the hue wheel. You can get nice yellow and gentle greens, but anything around turquoise just looks like cold white. The blue/violet looks amazing mixed with some orange/red tones, deeper than anything an RGB screen can show, but you can't do anything like the green/blue underwater scenes showing in the pictures.

Thanks - that's really useful info, I'll keep it in mind.
 
They are very addictive, I've spent thousands on them. I sometimes try to justify it as saving money on replacing blown bulbs - we live in a 400 year old cottage and standard bulbs would blow every single day due to the wiring. But in reality I just say I like how they make my home look and feel and everyone thinks the house looks better for the lighting. They are fun to play with for a few hours, disco scenes and the house on fire, I do like some of the animated scenes like the weather with the clouds passing over, but once you've got that out of your system it's just nice to have the house lit well. We now have all the rooms decorated fairly neutrally and we do indeed 'paint with colour' - no need to redecorate every time you want a change, you can change the room colour in a second.

One really useful tip, my eldest son's room is at the far end of the house, if I try and call him he can't hear me so I have to go up to him. I used to text him but he never looks at his phone, now I have a button programmed saved on a Hue Tap switch that I touch and his bedroom flashes red, he knows when to come!

Haha that last past made me laugh. I have 3 kids, the older 2 seem to go conveniently deaf when I call them. Love the idea of the flashing red or house on fire!!
 
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Had a chance to play with this new app last night. So far I think it's a huge improvement over the original. Thinking of the lights in terms of rooms makes infinitely more sense than the way the old app did it. It took me a bit to find scenes, you have to click on the room of lights you want to control, then at the bottom theres a tab for Scenes. The scenes themselves still baffle me as much as ever. I'm not sure why I'd want a "Mount Everest" scene that makes several lights white, a couple blue, a couple green. Beach scene? Have some orange, some red, some yellow, and some in between. None of it ever resembles what it's labeled, or anything at all really.

Biggest annoyance is the lack of iPad support, which is pretty unforgivable. These days you just need to pretty much check a box to enable auto resolution sizing, and they couldn't even be bothered to do that much.
 
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