Holiday app Festivitas puts Xmas lights on your Mac

Getting into the holiday spirit but still stuck at work? A cute new macOS called Festivitas can help you decorate your Mac computer screen with twinkling, holiday lights that are strung up from your menu bar and illuminate your dock.

This whimsical holiday treat was dreamed up by software developer Simon B. Støvring, the maker of other iOS apps favored by developers like text editor Runestone, scripting app Scriptable, JSON editor Jayson, and others. He’s been teasing the app on social media in the days ahead of its launch, showing off different customizations he added.

At launch, you’re able to adjust things like the cable thickness, size of lights, distance apart, drop height and width, flashing pattern, speed of flash, and colors. You can also switch to white lights instead of colored and can optionally disable the lights in the dock or menu bar, per your preferences.

That way, if you find the lights are distracting you from seeing, say, your important Slack notifications in the dock, you could simply turn the dock lights off during your workday. Or, if the menu bar lights are in the way of your collection of open Chrome tabs, you could choose to adjust the drop height so the lights sit above the tabs, for instance.

The app, which requires macOS 14.6 or later, has to be first enabled in the Mac’s Accessibility settings to work. (It’s a simple toggle switch, however). Afterwards, the lights are automatically added to your Mac and you can tweak their look and customize them to your preferences. To turn them off, you can just quit the app from the menu bar or dock.

The new app is available as a name-your-own-price download from the Festivitas website.

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