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Festivitas Lets You Add Holiday Lights to Your Mac Desktop

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If you're looking to get into the holiday spirit, developer Simon Støvring this week released Festivitas, a simple macOS app that lets you customize your Mac desktop with colorful string lights.

festivitas app
Festivitas adds lights to the Mac's dock and menu bar. Light size, distance, and cable thickness can be customized, as can the colors and the light changing sequence.

When Festivitas is first launched, it requires accessibility features to locate the dock and add the lights. Permissions can be revoked by going to System Settings > Privacy and Security > Accessibility.

Festivitas is compatible with Macs running macOS 14.6 and later, and it can be downloaded for four euros, which is equivalent to approximately $4.23.

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Top Rated Comments

H
hieranonymous
23 months ago
This feels like such a throwback to the nineties heyday of the classic MacOS, when novelty apps like this were common. macOS is all grown up now—vastly improved but with nary a trace of that old-timey whimsy.
Score: 26 Votes (Like | Disagree)
cateye Avatar
cateye
23 months ago
Worth mentioning that MacRumors forum member @Mithi made an adorbs desktop Christmas Tree app for MacOS ('https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/i-made-a-christmas-tree-for-your-mac.2373022/') a couple years ago and keeps improving and updating it each holiday since. And it's free!
Score: 24 Votes (Like | Disagree)
P
parkds
23 months ago
There was something back in the OS 9 era that did this. It might have simply been called Holiday Lights. I remember as a college kid really enjoying having them enabled this time of year.
Score: 21 Votes (Like | Disagree)
ErikGrim Avatar
ErikGrim
23 months ago
Now we just need to resurrect that snow extension (Flurry?) that put snow on your desktop and would cover the top of your windows.
Score: 18 Votes (Like | Disagree)
D
DCYorke
23 months ago

There was something back in the OS 9 era that did this. It might have simply been called Holiday Lights. I remember as a college kid really enjoying having them enabled this time of year.
These were fun times. My favourite was Oscar the Grouch in the trash can!
Score: 17 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Sowelu Avatar
Sowelu
23 months ago

There was something back in the OS 9 era that did this. It might have simply been called Holiday Lights. I remember as a college kid really enjoying having them enabled this time of year.
Holiday Lights ('https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/16740/maclampsx') is still alive and well. Not as many features as the original, but it has been updated to work on modern macOS. It's now 'MacLampsX'. I am rocking it as we speak (see screen shot).

I like the lights to just be on top with a calming twinkle and a steady flow of light snow, of course. And these are incandescent-looking classic lights, not the cold and ugly LEDs that we are mostly subjected to today in both real life and apps. I reached out to the developer years ago wondering whatever happened to this app and he said he was thinking about resurrecting it, and he did!

I miss the good old days when a bit of whimsy was built into most apps and operating systems with theme and icon packs and novelty software such as this. Anyone remember Stick Software ('http://www.sticksoftware.com/')? Eyeballs still work on modern macOS! There were so many fun and goofy apps. Catz? Dogz?

The 90's and early 2000's will always be my favorite internet (wild wild west) and Mac era (even vintage PCs). What I would give for someone to update the entire After Dark Screensavers collection and re-release it. Berkley Systems was acquired and folded into a Sierra division after After Dark 4 was released, and their parent company killed most of their titles (including most of Sierra eventually). It was never even updated for WindowsXP and it never worked in OS X. There are a few modules out there that will run on modern versions of macOS, but it's just not the same, of course.

Nowadays GUIs are so cold, boring and stoic. Apple, the pioneers of beautiful icons completely destroyed them and now we are living with ugly tile icons, many are just glyphs slapped onto tiles, and to add insult to injury, we cannot change most of them. Remember Candy Bar? Why can't we have nice things anymore?

Anyway, I like that you can add lights onto the dock, so I will of course give Festivitas a go.

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Score: 10 Votes (Like | Disagree)
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