Monday 20 November 2017

Smart home news

We've never really pushed this point but our smart bulb controllers for MacOS, LIFXstyle and Hue-topia, have deliberately functioned within your local network, free of dependency on the companies' cloud systems.

LIFXstyle has relied on LIFX's own development kit for Mac, which has long been unsupported and has gone out of date.

So we chose to put a lot of time into LIFXstyle,  writing our own code from the ground up to communicate via LIFXs LAN protocol (using their cloud system was never an option, even though it would have been an easier development journey). In early testing this seems reliable and responsive.

We've also made some well-overdue improvements to the interface. You can see from the early screenshots here that there's better navigation, allowing you to choose to view lamps / groups / locations / tags.  The status bar menu is improved, giving you more information and control up there in the status bar. There's a new minimalist layout, making four options for the layout of the interface. For changing the colour or warmth, we've made our own custom colour picker geared towards smartbulbs.



It still contains powerful features like scheduling, presets, the drag-and-drop effects designer, control of groups and locations (which will be in sync with the official phone app) and Applescript support. No price increase is planned and the new version will be a simple and free upgrade to existing LIFXstyle users.

Support for the new multi-zone strips and other enhancements are planned shortly.

Our Hue app, Hue-topia will inherit these interface changes after beta testing them. This new version of LIFXstyle is now available for download as a beta.

Black Friday / Cyber Monday offers on Scrutiny for Mac and Integrity Plus




50% off Scrutiny

For Black Friday / Cyber Monday


If you're a user of Integrity or Integrity Plus, or have trialled Scrutiny, we hope that this discount will help you to make the decision to add Scrutiny for Mac to your armoury. 

Simply buy through the app or Scrutiny's home page, the discount will be applied. Exp 28-11-2017


The offer will run for the next week or so, please feel free to share this offer, or use it to buy more licences if you have multiple users.


50% off Integrity Plus

For Black Friday / Cyber Monday


If you're a user of the free Integrity, you may like to learn about the extra power that Integrity Plus gives you. Search / filter / export your link results, Generate an XML sitemap and more. 

This offer is being run by MacUpdate, visit Integrity Plus's page at MacUpdate to take advantage. Exp 28-11-2017

The offer will run for the next week or so, please feel free to share this offer or use it to buy more licences if you have multiple users.


Improvements to website image size report in Scrutiny and Integrity



For image sizes you need to go to the links results, either the flat view (which will list each occurrence of each image) or the ‘by Link’ view (which will list each image once) and switch on the column ‘target size’ (if it’s not showing already). In the Filter drop-down you can select ‘Images’ to just show images.



Obviously you’ll need the ‘check images’ checkbox switched on in order to see images in the list.

There’s a new setting in your site’s settings, called ‘load all images’. With this checkbox off (it should be off by default) then you should still see image sizes in the columns, but they rely on the ‘content-length’ server response header field. That will be the compressed size of the image (if gzip compression is used) and may not be available in some cases.

With the ‘load images’ option on, each image is loaded so Scrutiny will know the exact size of the image. This is more reliable but obviously slows your scan a little.



The column in the by link and flat views can be sorted, so you can find the largest images easily.

If you export to csv then the export should reflect what you’re seeing in Scrutiny (ie filtered and sorted the same way)

This all applies to Scrutiny (from version 7.5.10) and Integrity and Integrity Plus (from version 6.11.6)