Philips Hue POS

Philips Hue is connected lighting — bulbs and light strips you set from warm white to any colour you like. This iPad app demonstrated it on the demo tables in stores, where Hue was on sale: tap a colour or a scene, and the real lights on display change, live, over Zigbee. I led the build at icapps.

Built for an Apple Store table

An app that runs in an Apple Store inherits a steep standard. It sits on the same demo table as Apple's own software, on hardware people walked in to admire, so it can't read as an afterthought beside either. The thing being sold is light — its colour, and the way it changes a room — and a screen can't emit any of that, so the interface had to stand in for it: colour that read true to what the bulb would do, and transitions that felt like a room settling rather than a slider moving. No one hands a shopper a manual, so every control had to make sense on first touch.

Tap, and the room changes

The whole point is the moment a tap turns into light. The app talked to the demo fixtures directly over Zigbee, so a chosen colour or scene reached the bulbs in front of you with no perceptible lag, and the screen and the room always agreed. It also had to survive a day of strangers — running untouched between visitors and finding its own way back to a clean state after each one, so the next person always met it fresh.

Why it was hard

Most apps are the thing a user came for. This one had to make something else — the light — look as good as it really was, running on its own and holding to the standard of the room it lived in. The bulk of the work went into the part nobody notices when it works: the colour landing right, and a tap lighting the table the instant you touched it.