I can control them individually or group them together. Check out the image below to see how these lights appear in the Home app. For my small house, the bulbs work just fine, but I would recommend the light switches for larger homes for convenience and to save money. With them, I can now turn on every light in my house with my phone or voice. These WiFi connected light bulbs are the gateway drug of home automation. The more open a platform is, the more flexible it will be now and in the future. Furthermore, the home automation space is still very young and fragmented. I only buy home devices that are equally compatible because I use Alexa in my house as well. These get special attention given that their HomeKit integration allows me to conveniently manipulate them all from within the Apple Home app and command them with Siri.Īll of the devices in this post are also compatible with the Amazon Echo.
But I thought that I would first take a moment to outline the top seven apps and devices that I am using in combination with the Apple Home app. I keep promising myself that a larger dive into my home automation workflow is coming to this blog.
Tagged: christopher cicconi, towson university, forscore, tonal energy tuner, goodnotes, alex shapiro, john mackey, putting the e in ensemble, composer diversity database, kaitlin bove, weather line, carrot weather, fidelity, the comet is coming, game of thrones, mad mac fury road, soundtrack, conducting, wind ensemble, concert band, repertoire, beat patterns, titles, orchestras, orchestral studies, director of bands, frank ticheli Thanks to my sponsor this month, MusicFirst. Please don't forget to rate the show and share it with others! Subscribe to Music Ed Tech Talk:Īpple Podcasts | Overcast | Castro | Spotify | RSS Robby - Trust in the Life-force of the Deep Mystery - The Comet Is ComingĬhris - Game of Thrones Highlights - Spotify Playlist | Mad Max: Fury Road Soundtrack The image above shows some other widgets I am experimenting with, but I think I prefer having more app icons there. I think what I have settled on is to have the Maps and Notes app widgets stacked on top of each other at the top, and then to use the Siri Suggestion widget, which shows me two rows of apps that swap in and out throughout the day based on my phone’s predictions of which apps I want to use in which contexts. I like it to be mostly another grid of tappable apps, but I am experimenting with various widgets here. I am continually playing with page 2 (right picture). I keep OmniFocus, Timery (for time tracking), Streaks (for tracking daily habits), and Waterminder (for quickly logging water) all on this screen because I can tap right on the buttons to act on these apps without the widget needing to launch into the app. As much as I like the newer widgets’ look, the older style widgets are interactive. The Today View (left image) is where I keep Siri Shortcuts and the older, legacy style widgets from iOS 13. Not even my second favorite weather widget, Carrot Weather, does that. It even manages to fit an hourly rain graph into its small space when it is raining out. The Weather Line widget is awesome because its user interface depicts the weather on a line, almost like a chart. I didn’t think I would want weather on this first screen, but now that it is always visible to me, I don’t see how I could live without it. Even this smallest widget size takes up four app icons, so they need to be beautiful and information-dense for it to be worth me sacrificing four apps. Weather Line and Fantastical have the best small-sized widgets, in my opinion. This will be a hard habit to break, but I find lots of value in having upcoming calendar tasks and weather permanently on my most visited screen.
Page one (middle image) contains my most tapped app icons.