Hasta La Gadget!

iOS notifications are great for keeping you up to date with whatever’s happening in your apps, but they get overwhelming quickly. With If This Then That, you can now refine those notifications so they’re less intrusive, smarter, and more useful. Here’s how.

Read more…

Like it or not, the holidays are upon us. That means all the stress and associated horribleness of shopping is also here. Luckily, you can tame your shopping list and save a few bucks in the process.

When Twitter placed user caps on third-party clients last year, IFTTT was one of a few services that decided to halt tweet integration, lest it run up against that cap and have to figure out an alternate solution. According to TechCrunch, however, it seems that the Twitter integration is back after extensive talks between the two companies. IFTTT, if you aren’t aware, is a handy internet service that lets you create custom actions between different apps and services with a set of triggers and actions — an example would be to send a picture to Picasa any time you upload it to Instagram.

So as you might expect, there are now new tweet triggers and actions. Examples of triggers include “New tweet by you” and “New tweet by you with hashtag” while actions could be “Post a tweet” or “Post a tweet with image” among others. Some interesting IFTTT Twitter recipes include the ability to automatically tweet a link once you post it to Facebook, a way to hook up G+ posts to Twitter and even a recipe that’ll bypass Instagram’s turning off Twitter cards. And since IFTTT works well with connected hardware like the Belkin WeMo and the Philips Hue, you could also send a tweet to turn those devices on or off. So if you’re hooked into Twitter and would love some automation in your life, head over to the IFTTT link below to get started on a recipe or just create your own.

Comments

Source: IFTTT, TechCrunch

Philips graciously released an API a few months ago for its Hue smartphone-controlled smart lightbulb to let developers tinker, and already there are a number of apps taking advantage. Today, mobile design firm Fresh Tilled Soil is showing off the hack it put together using that API and the IFTTT service for simple web-based programming to allow users to control their Philips systems via text message.

As you can see in the video, it just requires that you send messages to a number assigned by IFTTT with the color you want the lightbulbs to change to, and that info is passed on to the Philips router connected to your Internet connection to relay the messages to the bulbs themselves. You can specify the flicker pattern, and use the Philips Hue iPhone app to do a bunch more neat stuff, like change the lights to match the background color of a picture taken with the phone, for instance.

Fresh Tilled Soil provides a step-by-step guide of how they made this work on the site, so enterprising Hue owners are free to try it at home for themselves, and it doesn’t look too difficult thanks to the ease of using IFTTT. Philips is moving quickly in this space, probably to block out startup competitors like Lifx, but that competition is opening up lots of opportunities for devs and smart hacks like this one. It’s a very good time to be in the smart home space, as this seems like a crucial turning point that could lead to much wider mass market adoption of said technologies.

You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.

Comments