Built myself an AmbiLight… 

Here’s how it works:

Media is played by an iOS device which talks to the hue bridge in order to control the lights.

Thanks to AirPlay, video output can easily be redirected to an AppleTV while still leaving the actual processing to the iOS device, which I think makes this quite an elegant solution. 

As you can see in the demo, it works quite well. Playback, processing and control of 3 living colours and one hue lamp was done on an iPad mini. 

To be continued… 

Disclaimer: What is shown in the video is an experiment and not an official feature available in Reemote. Furthermore, none of this is affiliated with or endorsed by Philips hue in any way. 

If you follow me on twitter, you probably have noticed me getting excited about the previously launched Philips hue system.  

Well, I finally got my hands on a starter-kit which comes with 3 bulbs and most importantly a zigbee to ethernet bridge making it possible to control the entire system from pretty much anywhere or anything. 

In addition, and I love that Philips did this, other smart-link capable products such as living colors and living whites can be integrated as well. (whoo!) 

Naturally, I didn’t waste much time and started playing with some ideas right away, one of which is demoed in the video above.

What you see is 3 living colors units lighting my living room while Airfoil is streaming music to an AppleTV.

Playback is controlled with an iPad mini running an experimental build of Reemote that is capable of talking to the hue bridge and therefore all the connected lights. 

When tracks are changing, Reemote takes color information from the new tracks cover-art and lights the room accordingly.

Like what you see ?

You should probably follow me on twitter.

Fun little hack I wanted to show off for a while…

In the video you see me taking pictures on a Sony NEX7 using only my iPhone and MetaWatch.

The same works just as well for the internal iPhone camera and basically any DSLR that comes with a built-in IR receiver, although currently only Sony models are supported. 

So how does it work ?

Well,  it’s quite simple really. As shown in the video, there’s a bluetooth headset with an attached IR-led sitting ontop of the camera, pointing towards the internal IR receiver.

In order to trigger a shutter release the iPhone plays a sound-file (holding the encoded IR command sequence) on the headset which then converts the signal to IR using a simple led connected to the audio output.

Using a bluetooth headset instead of plugging the led into the iPhone directly has some advantages:

  1. It’s wireless, so the sender (iPhone) can be anywhere. 
  2. Can be used to amplify the signal, which in many cases would be too weak otherwise. 
  3. It’s a cheap, off the shelf component (just like the LED and audio jack) 

Simplest way to detect if a Mac app is installed

While rewriting some stuff for the new Reemote the other day, I realized that I could easily replace some ugly LaunchServices calls by using ScriptingBridge.framework instead.

Here it goes, plain and simple. 

-(BOOL)appIsAvailable:(NSString*)bundleID {
    SBApplication *sbApp = [SBApplication applicationWithBundleIdentifier:bundleID];
    return sbApp ? YES : NO;
}