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Using IFTTT with the Jawbone UP
The Jawbone UP fitness tracker is a lot more useful now that Jawbone has opened the API to third-party developers. One of the most exciting companies tapping into the UP platform is online automation tool, IFTTT. In the article below, I will talk a little bit about connecting your UP to IFTTT and then list some of my favorite recipes. IFTTT is an automation tool that allows you to setup tasks that happen at a certain time or in response to a certain event. It uses a trigger event ("If this happens") to initiate an action ("then do that"). Within the IFTTT framework, you create what are called recipes to select the trigger event and its resulting action. For example, you can create a recipe that uses a date/time trigger to send you an email at the same time each day. IFTTT is extremely useful because it ties into services, called channels, like Dropbox, Google Calendar and, of course, the topic of this post, the Jawbone UP. With IFTTT and an UP, you can do a myriad things like update your UP mood to exhausted when you get less than 6 hours of sleep, automatically add your morning coffee to your UP food list and log the daily weather. Configuring the UP within IFTTT is extremely easy. Just login to the IFTTT dashboard and click on the UP channel to activate your Jawbone account. You have to login to your Jawbone account and authorize Jawbone to share info with IFTTT. You can share your moods, moves, meals, events, sleep info, weight and more between IFTTT and UP. It's a bi-directional connection so you can pull down info from UP and send new information back to the fitness tracker. As you can imagine, there are a lot of ways to interact with the Jawbone fitness tracker using IFTTT. Below are some of my favorite IFTTT recipes for the UP. See the big picture of how you sleep. Track your Zzz's with a spreadsheet! If I get more than X hours of sleep, set my mood to 'energized' in my Jawbone UP feed Share Foursquare gym check-ins to your Jawbone UP feed Log my UP meals and their nutritional content into a Google spreadsheet Send your spouse a friendly email when you get below 7 hours of sleep Tweet when I walk more than 10,000 steps Remind me if I don't work out for 3 days If I get less than 5 hours of sleep, put on a pot o' coffee with WeMo #sunshine brings better #mood Tag an Instagram photo with #UP to share it with your team There are now 110 recipes on IFTTT for the UP and this number is climbing. If you have an UP, let us know in the comments if you use it with IFTTT.
IFTTT Recipes: Using Siri to turn on the Christmas lights
IFTTT Recipes is a new recurring column featuring recipes developed using IFTTT.com and their favorite IFTTT channels. Come see what TUAW bloggers cook up in the IFTTT labs! In this latest installment of IFTTT Recipes, I'll show you how to use Siri to turn on your Christmas lights -- and amaze the little ones at the same time. To perform this magic trick, you'll need a free IFTTT account, a Belkin WeMo Switch (US$49.95 from the Apple Store), the ability to send SMS text messages and a Siri-capable iPhone. First, log into IFTTT and enable the SMS channel. When you do this, IFTTT will set you up with a special SMS phone number. If you send a text message to that number from your iPhone, that can trigger an action. Next, set up a contact on your iPhone. To add fun to the effect, I set up a contact for Santa Claus, entering in his mobile number as the SMS phone number from IFTTT. Now make sure that your WeMo switch is plugged in and ready to go, and that you've enabled the WeMo channel on IFTTT. The WeMo switch is designed to handle a maximum of 15 Amps at 110 Volts. My vague recollection of a university electrical circuits class reminds me that P=I*V, where P=power, I=current and V=Voltage, so you'll want to make sure that all of your bulbs (indoor or out) don't require more than 1.65 kilowatts of power. Otherwise, you may need to set up multiple WeMo switches... In IFTTT, it's time to set up a recipe. I've blurred out the phone numbers, but you'll see it's as easy as this: if IFTTT's SMS account receives an SMS from your chosen iPhone, then it will turn on the WeMo Switch. In this case, my device's name is Living Room Lamp, but it's actually hooked up to the Christmas tree. Finally, gather kith and kin around you while drinking wassail and singing carols, and invoke Siri. Say "Send a message to Santa Claus saying turn on the Christmas lights", acknowledge that Siri understood the message, and let the recipe work its magic. Within about 10 to 15 seconds, the tree or your outside lights will pop on.
Microsoft announces SkyDrive SDKs for .NET and Windows Phone 8, highlights web integration
After the introduction of new APIs last year, Microsoft has released SkyDrive SDKs for almost every major platform including Windows 8, JavaScript Web library, Android and iOS. Now the cloud service has opened its doors to more of Microsoft's own with new SDKs for .NET and of course, Windows Phone 8. To entice even more developers to its side, the team at SkyDrive also integrated with services like IFTTT (If This Then That), which lets you customize action triggers between different web services, DocuSign, an electronic signature site and SoundGecko, a text-to-audio transcription service. It'll likely take a lot of work for SkyDrive to win over fans of Dropbox and Box.net, but opening up its doors to developers is a step in the right direction.
Send Instagram to Dropbox for a cool Apple TV screen saver
Just recently, I posted about the Instacube, a Kickstarter project that allows you to more easily show off your great (or at least well-filtered) photography work on Instagram. But it turns out you don't need a whole cube to do that. With the proper tweaking of IFTTT (a tool we at TUAW also love), you can set up Instagram images to display on your Apple TV's screensaver, making for a fun party trick or just a cool way to show off the pictures you've been taking. All you need to do is save your Instagram pictures to Dropbox, and then share that folder out to the Apple TV, and boom, instant streaming screensaver. There are a few hitches, unfortunately, and the biggest one is that your Apple TV won't automatically pull in new images, so you'll have to sync folders after you add (or remove) any images yourself to see new pictures. If you want to pull in pictures from more than one Instagram user, you'll also have to set up multiple IFTTT recipes, one for each user you want to watch. But the good news is that you can pull in from any other photo feeds as well -- maybe a better solution, to show off pictures from a party, for example, would be to use a Flickr tag so that anyone can post to it. At any rate, it's cool idea for sure. IFTTT is a really powerful tool, and hookups like this can really give your Apple devices to some new and interesting uses. [via MacStories]
IFTTT Recipes: Post to App.net
IFTTT Recipes is a new recurring column featuring recipes developed using IFTTT.com and their favorite IFTTT channels. Come see what TUAW bloggers cook up in the IFTTT labs! Wouldn't you like to post (tweet?) to App.net from the Twitter client you already love with no extra effort? IFTTT works that magic for you. App.net is a young, Twitter-like service. It's funded entirely by annual memberships, which is appealing to many who dislike intrusive advertising like sponsored tweets or Twitter's newly restrictive rules for developers. Since it's still in active development (alpha access is being slowly rolled out to early adopters), there's not much support by way of fully formed apps for iOS and OS X. I dislike posting from a browser, so I've been ignoring App.net for the time being. However, IFTTT's recently-added App.net support lets me contribute with the Twitter apps I already use. Here's how to build this recipe. First, enable both the Twitter channel and the App.net channel (provided that you're in on the alpha). Then follow these steps: Choose "New tweets by you" as the trigger. Optionally include mentions and retweets. Choose App.net as the action, then "Post an update." Fiddle with the ingredients to you liking (I accepted the default). Click "Create action," give it a name and finally click "Create recipe." You're done! Now tweets composed and shared with your favorite Twitter client will appear in your App.net stream. You'll have to go over there to monitor replies, etc., but this takes care of the posting. Enjoy!
IFTTT Recipes: Cool me off!
IFTTT Recipes is a new recurring column featuring recipes developed using IFTTT.com and their favorite IFTTT channels. Come see what TUAW bloggers cook up in the IFTTT labs! We don't have air conditioning in our house, but the low humidity in Colorado usually means that a fan is sufficient to stay comfortable. I thought it would be fun to have IFTTT turn on a fan near my desk whenever the temperature outside goes above 90°F. The IFTTT channels I used were Weather and WeMo Switch. One of the weather triggers is "Current Temperature Rises Above," so I set it up to fire when the current temperature at my location rises above 90°F. For the action, I set up the WeMo switch (see my review of WeMo here) channel to turn on when it received the trigger from Weather. The fan is a simple little desk fan that sits near my desk, so I plugged it into the WeMo. Sure enough, on those days when it gets hot outside, the fan automatically turns on. To ensure that the fan doesn't run longer than necessary, I've also created another recipe that turns the fan off when the outside temperature gets lower than 85°F. It's working really well! However, since the Weather channel uses outside temperature at a weather station near my home, the temperature reading isn't always accurate. I sent off an email to the makers of the Netatmo personal weather station to see if they'd consider creating a Netatmo channel on IFTTT -- that would be perfect, since I could use the Netatmo inside temperature reading to trigger the fan. It's an Internet-based thermostat!
Belkin's WeMo: iPhone-based home automation with a taste of IFTTT
In my futuristic dreams, I'm able to control everything in my house from my iPhone. That dream might not be too far off, thanks to the Belkin WeMo system. The WeMo currently consists of two hardware devices -- a Wi-Fi equipped power switch/outlet and a Wi-Fi equipped motion sensor -- plus a free WeMo iOS app; the entire Belkin WeMo system is an easy way to move into home automation. Let's take a look. Setting up the devices You can currently buy the WeMo switches for US$49.99 each or a set with a switch and a motion sensor for $99.99. I chose to buy the set, as I have some "experiments" I want to try. Belkin obviously looked at how other companies were doing setup of wireless devices and chose to come up with the most simple method possible. To get both switches working took me less than three minutes. %Gallery-162203% You begin by plugging the device into a standard wall outlet. At first, a small light flashes blue and red to indicate that the device isn't configured. Launching the WeMo app, you're given instructions on how to proceed. First, go to iPhone Settings, tap Wi-Fi and select the WeMo's temporary WiFi network. Next, go back to the app, where the device appears in a list. You tell the app the name of your normal home or office Wi-Fi network, enter the password for that network, and then choose whether to store the settings in the app. Doing the latter step makes set up of all other devices a real snap, as the app already knows the name and password for the network. And with that, you're done. After I played around with turning lights on and off for a while, I noticed that there was a firmware update for the WeMo boxes. The process for updating is easy. You basically tap a button on the iPhone screen and wait for about three minutes. Using the app and setting rules There's not too much to say about the app, other than once again it's simple. There are tabs for switches, sensors and rules. For the switches, you'll see a list of all WeMo switches on your network. Each switch, which you can give a custom name, has an on/off button. Tap the button, the device is turned on and the button turns green. Tap it again, the button goes back to gray and the device is turned off. With the motion sensor, there's not a lot you can do until you set up a rule. Rules are exactly that -- "turn on the living room lamp if the laundry room entrance sees motion on Mondays between 2 and 4 PM" as an example. Rules can also be used with the switches. You can choose to program a switch to go on or off at a specific time, or you can turn something on, then off again a few hours later. But the built-in rules are rather simple... WeMo, meet IFTTT Whoever the person was at Belkin who had the brilliant thought to integrate WeMo with If This Then That (IFTTT.com) should get a big raise. If you've never used IFTTT before, give it a try. There are currently 50 "channels" on IFTTT, with everything from Twitter and Facebook to ESPN and weather. You create "recipes" that perform a certain action if a specific trigger is met. For example, I use a recipe that tweets the URL of every post that I write on TUAW from my Twitter account. What does this have to do with WeMo? Well, there are IFTTT channels for the WeMo motion detector and switch. This opens up all sorts of possibilities. Say you want to receive a text message whenever your cat uses the litter pan. You set up a motion detector next to the litter pan, and every time el gato feels the need to go, you get tweeted. There are even wilder things you can set up. Plug a fan into a WeMo switch, then set up an IFTTT recipe to turn the fan on if the local outside temperature goes above 85° F (I tried this -- it works). Have IFTTT call you whenever someone enters the house (it works). And if you want to shut that fan off, you can either write another recipe or just use the WeMo app to shut it off remotely. For push notifications, mix in a dash of Pushover and those emails and phone calls you're receiving on your iPhone turn into regular old notifications. Conclusion While the components are a little pricey, the WeMo system is probably about the easiest home automation system to configure. Anyone can set up this system in minutes, then proceed to control lights, fans, appliances, and more from their iPhone anywhere there's data service. With the IFTTT integration, it's possible to set up a huge variety of recipes to mix and match apps and services to work at your command. Pros If WeMo was any more simple to set up, it would set itself up iPhone app is well written and easy to use Firmware updates are installed with one tap of a button Remote access extends your reach to your home lights and appliances to anywhere with data service Attractive design IFTTT integration turns a simple set of devices into a home automation powerhouse Cons A bit on the expensive side, but still affordable for many Who is it for? Anyone who wants to dabble with iPhone-controlled home automation but doesn't have the skills or patience to build their own hardware or write their own apps.
Log your social life with Hazel, Day One and IFTTT
TUAW's own Brett Terpstra has created a new tool called Slogger to help you log your online social life. Slogger, a shortened name for social logger, pulls down updates from your Twitter account, grabs posts from your RSS feeds, gathers links to your daily Github Gists and saves your last.fm playlists and loved tracks for the day. It also uses IFTTT along with Hazel to grab new images from Instagram, Flickr, and Facebook. All this information in then stored in Day One, a journaling app available on the Mac, iPad and iPhone. The script-based system is designed to run once a day so you can have a daily snapshot of your online social activity. You can read more about the technical side of how this system works and grab the scripts from Brett's website. #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
Belkin's WeMo home automation gear up for pre-order, iOS current control for under $100
Been quietly pining for Belkin's couch potato home automation solutions? Well, the wait is (almost) over, as the company has finally put its WeMo Switch and Motion products up for pre-order. You can reserve yours through Belkin or Amazon, with the Switch costing $49.99 and the Motion / Switch bundle setting you back a neat $99.99. Apple likes it enough to add the gear to its home-friendly repertoire in-store on the 26th, while other retailers, Verizon included, will be stocking them shortly afterwards. Rig the Switch up to your WiFi at home and you can control the flow of juice from its outlet via the WeMo iOS app (sorry, no Android love). Add in the motion detector and you can set rules for power control based on proximity triggers. Interestingly, Belkin also reports IFTTT integration, meaning the devices can be used for a lot more than the simple on / off remote commands and scheduling we originally thought. For those with iDevices, the free WeMo app is available now, not that it's particularly useful just yet. Need Mo? Check out the official PR and a promotional vid after the break.
