ADR1FT is the story of an astronaut who wakes up floating silently in space amongst the debris of destroyed space stationthe only survivor of a catastrophic event, left with no memory, a critically damaged EVA suit leaking oxygen and no way home.
Wow, what a birthday week it has been! We’ve had a new supervisor release, one of the largest and most user-driven core releases, thanks to the month of What The Heck?!. We even got RFID tags right into the heart of Home Assistant, but we’re not done yet! We have “One more thing…”
Home Assistant Companion is a new application for Mac to control your Home Assistant instance, exposing your Mac sensors to Home Assistant and to receive notifications.
Like many recent updates to the iOS app, we have @zacwest to thank for this. Zac has ported the iOS app over to Mac and added some great new features specifically for the Mac.
If you’re a Windows user, don’t worry, you can integrate your PC with the great IOT Link tool.
Home Assistant Companion running on a 16-inch Mac Book Pro
Home Assistant Companion for macOS adds several new binary sensors for your Mac, showing whether it is active and whether a particular microphone or webcam is in use.
Each camera and microphone has its own binary_sensor
showing whether it is active or not. These can enable some really useful automations, especially for those home working at the moment. You could automatically turn off the radio when answering a call or close the blinds behind you to improve your video quality. To see just how useful this can be in the real world, check out this video of how our very own Frenck is using these sensors in his streaming set up.
The “active” sensor reports whether the Mac is being actively used. In other words that it is not sleeping, not showing a screensaver, not locked and not just sat idle. You can configure the “Time Until Idle” in one-minute steps from a minimum of 1 minute. You’ll find this option in the Sensors section of Preferences.
One huge advantage of running on a Mac compared to a mobile device is the much larger battery. This means we are not constrained by battery-saving measures and can address one of the most common gripes with the iOS app, update intervals. On a Mac, entity updates are immediately triggered when something changes. You will see this reported by the sensor.DEVICE_NAME_last_update_trigger
reporting Signaled
.
Home Assistant Companion for macOS already supports widgets in Big Sur. Right now, we have an Actions Widget where you can have up to eight actions. You can also create multiple widgets with different sets of actions. If you have an idea for other widgets you’d like to see, pop over to the community forums and let us know.
The large Home Assistant Actions widget in Big Sur.
The Mac app is definitely a Mac app. The App Configuration page has been removed from Home Assistant’s sidebar. Instead, the configuration options and preferences are on the menu bar right where you’d expect to find them for any other app and all the standard shortcuts work too (like ⌘,
for Preferences). You can even open multiple Lovelace windows via File > New.
You can have multiple Home Assistant Companion windows open.
In the menu bar, you will also find an option to manually send an update to Home Assistant and a new Actions menu where you can see all your actions and fire them.
Just like the iOS app, you can send notifications to your Mac with services like notify.mobile_app_DEVICE_NAME
. One small difference is that critical notifications are not yet available for the Mac app. However, all our other notifications features like actionable notifications work on the Mac app. To see what is possible, take a look at the docs.
We are updating the Companion App docs with details for the Mac app. You can also pop over to the Discord channel. If you find a bug or have an idea for a feature, please open up an issue on the GitHub repository.
You can get the beta right now from the home-assistant/ios
repository: download the home-assistant-mac.zip
file from the latest release, unzip and drag it over to your Applications folder. Done!
That’s it. All that’s left is to wish Home Assistant Happy Birthday one last time and to wait and see what amazing developments the next year brings.
Tom
To use a keyboard shortcut, press and hold one or more modifier keys and then press the last key of the shortcut. For example, to use Command-C (copy), press and hold the Command key, then the C key, then release both keys. Mac menus and keyboards often use symbols for certain keys, including modifier keys:
On keyboards made for Windows PCs, use the Alt key instead of Option, and the Windows logo key instead of Command.
Some keys on some Apple keyboards have special symbols and functions, such as for display brightness , keyboard brightness , Mission Control, and more. If these functions aren't available on your keyboard, you might be able to reproduce some of them by creating your own keyboard shortcuts. To use these keys as F1, F2, F3, or other standard function keys, combine them with the Fn key.
You might need to press and hold some of these shortcuts for slightly longer than other shortcuts. This helps you to avoid using them unintentionally.
* Does not apply to the Touch ID sensor.
The behavior of these shortcuts may vary with the app you're using.
For more shortcuts, check the shortcut abbreviations shown in the menus of your apps. Every app can have its own shortcuts, and shortcuts that work in one app might not work in another.