Control Philips Hue From Your Mac’s Menu Bar With New App For OS X

Philips Hue is a fun but expensive way to turn your at-home lighting into an interactive experience to pass your idle hours, but so far it’s been mostly controlled via smartphone. Chances are, you spend a good portion of your day at your computer, and it’s likely easier to control things from there. Enter Hue Menu, a new Mac menu bar app that gives you direct control over your Philips Hue light bulbs.

Philips opened up Hue’s API to third-party developers after recognizing there was a strong appetite already in the community for add-on software and programs. Hue Menu takes advantage of the company’s new efforts to reach out to the community by putting controls for brightness, on/off state of individual lights, color and more right where it’s readily available whenever you use your Mac. You can do things like change color based on Mac’s built-in color picker, add color presets, and even sample colors directly from photos stored on your Mac.

Upcoming features planned by Hue Menu developer Charles Aroutiounian include alarms and timer-based lighting settings, as well as geofencing and more. Like with the IFTTT hacks and other neat tricks built around Hue, this will likely have limited appeal, but it’s still a cool way your Mac can make life a bit more interesting if you’re a Hue/connected home fan.