Lights Out

Controlling your smart home like it's 1991.

About

Lights Out is a (minimal) frontend for Home Assistant written for Macintosh System 7 and up. As of right now, you can only control your lights. Support for other actions is slated for a future release.

When you first launch Lights Out, you are asked to enter your Home Assistant server configuration: the host, port, and a long-lived access token (which can be generated via the web frontend, details here). You are then presented with the main window, which has room for three light controls. You can add lights via File ⇒ Add Entity. To remove a light, select it (by clicking anywhere outside the slider) and picking Edit ⇒ Clear.

Lights Out was developed using CodeWarrior 9 Gold on System 7.5.3. In principle, it should work on earlier versions of System 7, but it has not been tested. It has been tested working on OS 9 on real hardware (my iMac G3). It currently requires the use of Open Transport for networking (version 1.1.2 or higher).

Where can I get it?

Current release: Lights Out v0.2.4 (154KB StuffIt archive, includes source code)

Additionally, Lights Out can be found on AmendHub.

Changelog

Version 0.2.4 (April 21st, 2025):

• Bugfix: properly check for Thread Manager before using it
• Use standard window border for compatibility with earlier System versions

Version 0.2.3 (March 18th, 2025):

• Bugfix: handle missing brightness attribute (happens e.g. when light is physically powered off)
• Bugfix: update scroll position after removing bar in bar_remove
• Bugfix: zero window_info.scrollBar if the scrollbar is removed

Version 0.2.2 (March 15th, 2025):

• Add LICENSE information

Version 0.2.1 (March 14th, 2025):

• Workaround for inconsistent max brightness in HA

Version 0.2 (March 13th, 2025):

• Support for scrolling so the main window can show >3 entities
• Support for selecting and removing entities
• Add room for drag control at the bottom of the slider
• Properly calculate the new slider value without loss of precision

Version 0.1 (March 10th, 2025):

• Initial release.