Download Festive Lights for Mac - Widget to decorate your Dashboard with animated lights. MacUpdate.com

Festive Lights 5.0.1

Your rating: Now say why...

(2) 5

Widget to decorate your Dashboard with animated lights. Free

Add to my Watch List
Email me when discounted

Download
627 KB
Visit Developer's Site
Interdimension Media

Decorate your Dashboard. This widget dresses your Mac in elegant animated lights with over a dozen motion patterns including blink, twinkle, chase, and more. Install custom lightsets to suit every season and taste-from Christmas to Hanukkah, St. Patrick's Day to the 4th of July.

Festive Lights offers you every adjustment you could hope for, from the set and pattern to placement, scale, speed, and animation parameters, so download it now and get festive!

What's New

Version 5.0.1:

Attribution tag gives credit to creators of custom lightsets
Six new light patterns, including new dimming patterns for elegant fading lights
Improved lightset removal support
Updated standard lightsets are livelier than ever before
Animated tags add a bit of festive flair
New rendering engine with improved performance
Improved multi-monitor behavior
Simplified lightset format makes creating custom lightsets even easier
Adds support for OSX 10.4 Tiger (5.0.1)
Minor bug fixes

Version 5.0.1:

Attribution tag gives credit to creators of custom lightsets
Six new light patterns, including new dimming patterns for elegant fading lights
Improved lightset removal support
Updated standard lightsets are livelier than ever before
Animated tags add a bit of festive flair
New rendering engine with improved performance
Improved multi-monitor more...

Requirements
Intel/PPC, Mac OS X 10.4 or later

MacLampsX

+2
Free

Light holiday bulbs on your ...

Festive Lights User Discussion (Write a Review)

ver. 5.x:

(2)

Your rating: Now say why...

Overall:

(3)

sort: smiles | time

+368

Steven Goodheart reviewed on 10 Dec 2009

Wow, just downloaded and tried this, and it works great! (24 inch iMac Intel with SL 10.6.2)

Really nice looking and festive....just love it! Makes me want to open my widgets just to look at it. :) Love to have something like this for my desktop.

Thanks to the developer, and holiday greetings to all.

[Version 5.0]

Roro01 tipped on 03 Dec 2007

Use this widget if you want to decorate the Dashboard. For those of us who want to decorate the desktop - download MacLampsX for surrounding lights or/and XMasLights for hanging lights.

The light sets in User/Library/Application Support/Festive Lights/Lightsets are folders containing "on" and "off" sets of bulbs in .png image format. You can download more through the widget. Read XMasLights's Readme - it should give you an interesting idea!

[Version 3.0]

2 Replies

esqwuared (developer) replied on 04 Dec 2007

Just as a note, you can also easily place the Festive Lights widget directly on the Desktop for continual viewing by turning on Dashboard development mode. There is a small section on my website describing how to set it up.

Roro01 replied on 04 Dec 2007

Thank you very much for your reply. It is also possible to move this widget, like any other one, from the widget bar to the desktop by clicking and holding the widget in the bar, pressing the F12 key and then releasing the mouse button (for other users - the next time you prompt the dashboard, the widget is swept back into the dashboard layer). The problem with both methods - DevMode widget & the one I have described here - is that the surrounding lights appear above the menu bar and even above the Dock. However, your suggestion is perfect for hanging lights.

Roro01 commented on 14 Nov 2007

This is a brilliant idea but it should be built as an ordinary application and not a widget. The reasons are:

1. Prompting the Dashboard display all the widgets so one have to quit them all.

2. Even if you quit all the widget the dock still shows.

The application should have a full screen mode so the display would not sleep.

[Version 3.0]

1 Reply

+32

Bruce_Y replied on 30 Nov 2007

Ditto --

Please add my vote for developer to make a build of this that runs as a standalone, non-widget, application.

I am one of those folks who rarely use widgets, and most of the time i have Dashboard disabled. (saving my system RAM and CPU for apps I want active)

I certainly would not activate Dashboard and have it active on all the time just to get the lights.
Thus my request for stand-alone app.
Thank you.

insomnis reviewed on 14 Nov 2007

Great implementation of bringing blinky festiveness to your dashboard. Done well, nice options and and the ability to create and download additional lightsets gives the widget some longevity in my dashboard. This kind of thing will make my wife's holiday.

A loading message at startup may be nice, as on first run I was starring at a single light for about 20 seconds (on my multitasking iMac) trying to figure out how to configure it. Suddenly my screen was filled with blinking lights, and I realized all was well.

[Version 3.0]

-1

+34

Tice commented on 13 Oct 2006

: ( The widget tries to connect to some server! Why???

[Version 2.1]

1 Reply

esqwuared (developer) replied on 17 Oct 2006

All of my widgets run semi-regular update checks in order to alert you when new versions become available.

While it is some network activity, it's quite lightweight and isn't transmitting any personal data to the server.

Still, I hope you enjoy it.

- Eben

+49

accountclosed had trouble on 09 Dec 2009

Hate to have to report it, but this latest version (5.0) has not fixed the "white background" issue on my system (a MacBook Pro 2.2 Intel running 10.6). It's a shame, as this worked fine under Leopard. The program is lovely (when it's working) and deserves to be supported via donations, but this is unusable in its current state. No idea why this white background appears and won't go away, and there's unfortunately no way to contact the developer through the Interdimension Media web site.

[Version 5.0]

1 Reply

Esqwuared (developer) replied on 16 Dec 2009

I'm sorry to hear it's not working for you, though I haven't heard any reports of the problem you describe before. If you get in touch with me via the contact form on the main page of the site (http://interdimensionmedia.com/widgets/) I'd be happy to try to troubleshoot it with you. Thanks.

+49

accountclosed had trouble on 04 Dec 2009

Updated to v. 5.0 under 10.6. Widget now shows a white background (rather than transparent) some of which clears upon clicking the "i" (info) button, but long (screen-wide) sections of it remain making the widget unusable. This is a worthy widget, but has become problematic for me in Snow Leopard. Trashing prefs has no effect.

[Version 4.5]

Mariposas7 had trouble on 28 Sep 2009

Just got a new Macbook and am having trouble installing different light sets. Also can't seem to get it to switch to the colored lightset. Haven't had an issue with this on my other computer, but for some reason it's just not happening when dragging the set into the white tag...

[Version 4.5]

Roro01 had trouble on 02 Dec 2008

This new version keeps crashing on my iMac Intel 10.4.11

[Version 4.0]

1 Reply

esqwuared (developer) replied on 07 Dec 2008

Sorry about that! If you haven't found it yet, I've released version 4.2 which fixes this problem. It should appear here on macupdate, shortly, but in the meantime you can find it directly on my site.