What’s new for HomeKit in macOS Mojave public beta 2
Today Apple has released the second beta for macOS Mojave to public beta testers, after providing developers with the updated beta earlier this week. While the changes this time around relatively minor, there are a few things that caught our eye within public beta 2.
First, Apple has added a home icon at the top left hand side of the Home app window on the mac. While this button presently does not do anything (for us) once clicked, we assume that it is there to provide quick access to other homes that a user may have set up. The location of the icon, being tied to the window of the Home app, means that it stays available no matter what tab you are within in the app. Of course, since this is a beta, we did see instances where this new icon/button would simply disappear, requiring us to have to close the app and open it again for it to show up again. We also noticed that the icon used for this new button, is the same exact home icon that is used within Safari.
The second thing that we noticed was that the “add” (or plus) icon, located on the top right of most tabs within the home app was tweaked slightly. In public beta 2, the icon now sports a much thinner look, which makes it fall more in line with the other buttons within the app. The final things that we noticed were things that we may have missed from public beta 1. One being that when in a room within the home app, the app will display a bar with the room name that will appear when scrolling vertically, which provides as a visual reminder as to what room that you are currently in. The other, is that the help option for the Home app, provides placeholder text to indicate that this section is not yet complete and will be added at a later date.
As mentioned earlier, since we are still early in the beta process, we did encounter some bugs within the Home app in public beta 2. The most prominent bug that we ran into was that we were met with issues swiping between rooms within the app. While it would work most of the time, there were instances where we the function simply did not work at all, again requiring us to close the app and re-open it to have the functionality return. Another bug that we ran into was that the right click menu, when selecting a device tile, would sometimes display a line under the settings option, as well as the included some extra space underneath, which again, while minor, was a little strange to see. Adding custom room background images, while showing the ability to do so in the app, was also not functioning in this version of the beta. Actionable notifications, particularly with Camera motion events, are still not available in public beta 2, which while it may not be a bug, it would be nice to see for consistency between iOS and macOS. Camera thumbnail images on notifications are unfortunately, still not yet available on macOS as well.
Stay tuned for more on macOS and HomeKit as the Mojave beta process rolls on, we will certainly keep you updated on any changes that we find.
