In the early months of the pandemic in 2020, when the UK was in lockdown, I finally decided to go ahead with some home plans to make some devices easier to manage.
La primera victoria fácil en esta área fueron las luces inteligentes. Over the course of a weekend, I replaced every light we used in the house with a smart lamp that would be available to manage through Apple's Home app or Amazon's Alexa as a way to control the lights. of the living room.
But while Apple's Home app, where you can manage all your lights and other smart home devices, was pretty easy to use, it never had any widgets, which always baffled me.
Widgets first hit (*16*) 14 in 2020, but it took an innovative app called Home Widget (Opens in a new tab) to alleviate my annoyance at the lack of a Home Widget. Now I have a bunch of widgets on my home screen for my lights, without opening a single app.
Let there be light (intelligent)
Available for free, plus a $8.99 / £8.99 / AU$10.99 in-app purchase to allow you to create unlimited widgets, the app will monitor every smart device connected to your iPhone and they will appear in the app.
After that, you can create different panels for lights or other devices in your house, as well as choose colors, icons, etc.
Once you're done, you can place them on the home screen of your iPhone or iPad. Tapping one of these will toggle whatever you've selected on or off, without having to go into an app like Apple's Home.
Yes, this may seem very obvious to those who don't have smart lights in their home that manage them through an iPhone, but after two years of using the Home app, it still feels like a (*16*) feature, that Apple has introduced ever since. 2020, it cannot be found in its own Home app.
But Home Widget gets it right, especially when it comes to how easy it is to manage your widgets. There's also a nice app touch that displays all the widgets you've created on your home screen, in a Tetris layout.
The app was recently updated to version 1.2, which supports HomeKit cameras, battery sensors, colorize your lights, and more.
Regardless of whether Apple brings widgets to its Home app in the future, possibly at WWDC 2022, the Home Widget is already a favorite and solves a major itch I've had around my home for two years.