Well a proper native app could offer some very nice benefits in the form of system sensors. The brand new macOS app has sensors for your computers battery level and state, storage space, etc so you could create some nifty automations around that.
One of the cooler sensors that Robbie just added to the Mac app is a camera one. So if you’re working from home in a video conference call, as soon as your camera becomes active it could turn on a light outside your room so your family members know not to disturb you.
Not trying to disagree with you that an app would be cool, but I’m accomplishing those two use cases currently with:
Telegram Desktop for notifications (though this can be done a lot of ways)
IOTLink for computer information (battery, CPU, memory, storage, etc) fed to HA via MQTT. I’d imagine the camera could be included in IOTLink as well, though I’ve not tried it.
An “am I in a call” sensor could also be used to pause the music you’re playing as soon as you go into a call, and resume when you leave. That’s something I find myself pausing manually and forgetting to resume.
Similarly, with “am I in full screen mode” it could automatically dim the lights when gaming / watching video.
I like this one too. Having maybe the option to turn the display of or on so i can use a windows tablet for lovelace while being able to display lovelace based on presence
There’s not a blog post or official documentation for the macOS app yet (I will start working on docs soon). For now you can read about it on the iOS release notes page. You can also download the Mac app from those release notes as well by pressing the “Assets” button.
The coolest part IMO is probably the “Active” sensor which determines whether your computer is currently in use by looking at a number of criteria - whether it’s locked, sleeping, if the screensaver is on, if you haven’t touched the mouse for a certain period of time (this is user configurable), etc.
And just an hour ago Zac released a new mac build with a microphone sensor. So now if you’re in a voice call or recording a podcast or something, Home Assistant can know about that and you can run automations based off that. Pretty neat.
Agreed. I would love to be able to tell when I am at the computer. That is one of the reasons I proposed this because I saw how awesome the Mac App is!
While I have not tested this yet, I believe Windows 11 can, or will soon be able to, run Android apps. Not sure how natively that will run (meaning sensors for Windows machine and notifications) but it may be enough for some.
