Have A Philips Hue System? Rapid Hue Makes It Easier Than Ever To Control Your Lights

Philips Hue is a lighting system that consists of three bulbs that connect to your home’s Wi-Fi and plug in to any standard lamp. You can control the lights with an accompanying iPhone app from Philips, using it to change the colors, the brightness, and to turn the lights on or off. While the Hue system is fantastic, the Philips Hue app leaves a lot to be desired. Luckily, Philips recently released an iOS SDK and developer tools to make it easier to build apps, and thus far, there’s been a trickle of fun Hue-enabled apps. For example, Ambify allows you to connect your Hue system to music, and the recently released Rapid Hue app makes it easier to control your lights from your phone. Rapid Hue is a simple app, but that’s what makes it great. The app displays rows of colors for each bulb, which are divided into sections. The left most section represents brightness, the middle represents hue, and the right section controls saturation. You can use these controls in conjunction to quickly shift the colors of your Hue bulbs. For example, if you want a bright deep red light, you can set it to maximum brightness, choose a red hue, and then choose a highly saturated red. If you want a less dramatic red tint, you only need to lower the saturation. Turning your phone from the standard portrait mode to landscape mode will give you additional colors to work with. While you can achieve all of these colors with the standard app, it’s much quicker getting a nice color scheme established with Rapid Hue. It isn’t possible to save color schemes with Rapid Hue, however, so it’s best for quick, simple adjustments that you want to make. Rapid Hue can also be used to turn off your Hue lights - just shake your phone and the lights go out. It’s one of the best features of the app. If you have a Hue system and want an easier way to get your preferred colors, then Rapid Hue is well worth the $0.99 purchase price. [gallery link="file" columns="2"]

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