Making a Scene: When Apple Home gave me lemons, I went bananas
You might wonder why I have an Apple Home scene called Banana Room and another called Lemon Room. I wonder this, too.
It all started late last year, as we planned to be away from home for a few weeks, and thought it was a good time to test automation and smart devices. We have had a very slow household adoption of such, and stick to HomeKit-compatible devices.
Our thermostats were HomeKit-connected, as were a couple of smart bulbs. We upgraded our deadbolt to a smart lock, as we might have needed to let people in remotely while out of town. We also installed some simple smart outlets.
While this generally worked as expected, there’s a binary problem with groups of devices we keep encountering. I developed a strategy to work around the problem of what “turning off” really means in an Apple Home context.
A contradiction in terms
Apple Home calls smart home items accessories, and you can organize accessories into collections called scenes, with each accessory having an assigned action. Accessories can be placed into rooms. So our Living Room has several accessories, which include a porch light (light bulb), four smart outlets (all lights), the smart lock, and our Apple TV. (Apple Home is now Apple’s user-facing branding for interacting with HomeKit-compatible devices, and you use the Home app to access and configure smart home stuff.)
A scene has actions it takes on accessories. When you add an accessory like a light, you can set it to be on or off. (If the light is already on and set to be on, it remains on; same with off.) If a light offers intensity and color options, you can adjust them, too. This lets you create scenes that modify lighting rather than toggle lights.
Because we don’t turn on all our living room lights at once most of the time, I created a scene called “Main Living Room.” That was probably a bad idea. Siri doesn’t always interpret requests the same way. When I would say, “Turn on Main Living Room,” Siri would sometimes use the scene name and turn on my selected three lights, but other times it would activate all five lights in the Living Room scene.
Also, if I said to Siri, “Turn off Main Living Room,” Siri would respond, “You can’t turn off scenes.”
This is a weird thing for Siri to tell me because a scene’s button in Home is a toggle; you can also add scenes to Control Center. When the scene is active, after you’ve turned it on—either verbally or by tapping the button—it changes from a gray background with white type to a white background with an orange icon and black type.
Tap or click that button? The scene is…turned off. All the accessories are activated or switched to their previous state. Apple’s documentation on that part is mute, noting only, “To turn on a scene, tap or click it, or ask Siri.” What about off, Apple? What about off?
[ Joe Rosensteel wrote about Krampus visiting him for Christmas in 2023, noting this scenes problem in the context of a set of greater HomeKit woes that Apple has, largely, still not improved or fixed. ]
Rearranging the scenery
If you’ve read this far, you might be yelling, “Glenn, why didn’t you just rename Main Living Room Lights to something unique!” Stop yelling! I did. But it didn’t solve the Siri problem, as explained above.
To work around both Siri’s ambiguity with the name and its limitation of “turning off” scenes, I renamed the “on” scene to Banana Room and the off scene Lemon Room. Banana Room has the three lights I want to turn on via their connected outlets; Lemon Room, their corresponding off state. Why those names? Because they are so distinct, Siri wouldn’t mistake them for anything else.1
I found that Siri still has some clarity issues. If I said, “Activate Banana Room” or “turn on Banana Room,” it might try to play a song with that name in Music. Now I say, “Activate Banana Room in Home” and “Activate Lemon Room in Home.” This feels vaguely like something a cut-rate James Bond villain might utter.
Because Apple is Apple, I noticed something happened to these two scenes when the other was active. Scene buttons reflect whether the current state of the accessories selected for them is exactly as defined in the scene. If so, the scene’s button deactivates. When I activate Banana Room, if Lemon Room is shown as active, its button state changes to inactive, and vice versa.
The whole thing drove me lemons, but now I’ve made banana bread.
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
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I’ve long used [[banana]] as a search-and-replace token when I needed to remove one kind of thing, replace other similar things that would have matched it, and then restore the original in the other cases. This can be quicker than figuring out the precise
grepyou need. ↩
[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing (Aperiodical LLC) and How Comics Are Made (Andrews McMeel Publishing).]
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