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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.jpg

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.

Article Link: Festivitas Lets You Add Holiday Lights to Your Mac Desktop
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/12/05/festivitas-holiday-lights-mac/
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It makes me wonder what’s changed culturally with computing that these gimmick apps, which adults used, are not so common - I remember neko the cat following the mouse around on the PC, or people changing the mouse cursor… these things don’t happen / aren’t a thing now…. Why?
 
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Marbles1 said:
It makes me wonder what’s changed culturally with computing that these gimmick apps, which adults used, are not so common - I remember neko the cat following the mouse around on the PC, or people changing the mouse cursor… these things don’t happen / aren’t a thing now…. Why?
Click to expand...
Likely because they are harder to make. Everything on a system level is locked down now. It's not the wild west of extensions, control panels or even kexts anymore.
 
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Marbles1 said:
It makes me wonder what’s changed culturally with computing that these gimmick apps, which adults used, are not so common - I remember neko the cat following the mouse around on the PC, or people changing the mouse cursor… these things don’t happen / aren’t a thing now…. Why?
Click to expand...
those novelties have worn off and the latest novelty is genAI ...
 
parkds said:
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.
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Holiday Lights 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? 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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ErikGrim said:
Now we just need to resurrect that snow extension (Flurry?) that put snow on your desktop and would cover the top of your windows.
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'Let It Snow' is pretty much the modern version with similar (and lots of) settings. It's been around for a while and still works in the latest version of macOS.

Screenshot 2024-12-05 at 5.53.47 PM.png


There are a couple of other snow apps in the AppStore as well!
 
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ErikGrim said:
Everything on a system level is locked down now.
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As it should be.

Had a relative who installed different "sparkly cursor" mods back in their Windows days. Took multiple rounds of getting hacked for them to understand what malware is...
 
Marbles1 said:
It makes me wonder what’s changed culturally with computing that these gimmick apps, which adults used, are not so common - I remember neko the cat following the mouse around on the PC, or people changing the mouse cursor… these things don’t happen / aren’t a thing now…. Why?
Click to expand...

Novelty of new things in mass adoption. Entire era was gimmicks. Ringtones, MySpace layouts you name it. There used to be long active threads like "post your desktop" similar to how posting your internet speed used to be a huge flex when it actually mattered now these things have died off. Today a dude with 2 gig fiber has similar web browsing to the basic tier internet guy but 20 years ago the guy on his work's T3 line was legitimately in a different world over many users.

At some point people stop caring as much. Now we get to flex on Tiktok doing dance offs.
 
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fathergll said:
Novelty of new things in mass adoption. Entire era was gimmicks. Ringtones, MySpace layouts you name it. There used to be long active threads like "post your desktop" similar to how posting your internet speed used to be a huge flex when it actually mattered now these things have died off. Today a dude with 2 gig fiber has similar web browsing to the basic tier internet guy but 20 years ago the guy on his work's T3 line was legitimately in a different world over many users.

At some point people stop caring as much. Now we get to flex on Tiktok doing dance offs.
Click to expand...

these sorts of things still go on

have you not visited r/unixporn?
 
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