🇺🇸

Deck your Dock with holiday lights with Simon Støvring’s Festivitas app

The holidays really arrived in my household today. Not only did my wife and I harvest and decorate our Christmas tree…

A decorated Christmas tree adorned with colorful lights and ornaments stands next to a gray couch in a cozy living room. Wall art and garlands enhance the festive atmosphere.
We found a great one this year.

…but I also decorated my macOS desktop! Developer Simon Støvring (of Runestone, Scriptable, Jayson, and Data Jar fame) has launched what’s sure to be the hit app of the holidays: Festivitas.

Colorful, rectangular iPod nano depictions drip vertically, resembling a spectrum, against a light blue backdrop. The desktop displays tasks, weather, and notifications. Festive lights adorn the top edge.
Festivitas brings precisely the whimsical joy that I love to see in the holiday season.

The one-liner description:

Festivitas brings the holiday spirit to your Mac with festive lights for the dock and menu bar 🎄

I loved watching the development of this delightful little app as Simon added the animated lights, menu bar option, the ability to grow and shrink with the Dock, and more. It’s amazing how quickly it came together — about a week! — while being a polished Mac app. Here’s its settings window, which allows fine-tuned adjustments for all sorts of things, including the colors of the lights.

A software settings window displays controls for “Festive Lights,” with sliders for cable thickness, light size, distance, drop width, and drop height. Options include patterns, speed, and color selections.
That’s a great-looking settings screen.

I set mine to match the wonderful nano-chromatic wallpaper by BasicAppleGuy! Or you could follow Jason Snell’s lead with Apple’s traditional six colors.

But perhaps my favorite little-yet-over-the-top touch that Støvring added is the animated app icon in the Dock:

Icons bounce along the Mac Dock: a calendar with “Dec 4,” cloud app, animated holiday lights, security app, document thumbnail, and an overflowing trash bin, set against a blue background.
I didn’t even know you could do that with a macOS app icon!

All the joy it’s already brought me in just a few hours is absolutely worth Støvring’s €4 asking price on Gumroad.

The real question is, how far into the new year am I going to keep these Festivitas lights up? If my trend with our Christmas tree is anything to go by, it will be far longer than is socially acceptable. You’ll never stop me! 🎄

Apps


❮ Previous post

The media starts to fold December 4, 2024

Next post ❯

A few Apple features that I was super excited for, but have yet to ever try December 5, 2024