Festive Lights – they’re not just for [insert holiday here]!

Festive Lights

I just discovered a great holiday extra for those of you who are running Mac OSX.4 Tiger— Interdimension Media make a Widget called Festive Lights. In its default state Festive Lights is a string of decorative lights for your Dashboard, but if you combine it with the DevMode Widget by Jeremy Williams, you can drag your Festive Lights from the Dashboard out onto the desktop for neverending holiday spirit! For those who are technically impaired, here’s a quick twinkly desktop bling walkthrough:

  1. Make sure you are running OSX.4 or higher
  2. Download and install the Festive Lights Widget (after downloading, the installer should run automatically)
  3. Trick out your new Widget with as many custom lightsets as you like (download them from the same page as the Festive Lights Widget— follow the installation instructions) and get your twinkle-to-colour ratio set up exactly how you want it
  4. Download and install the DevMode Widget
  5. Click the red button on the Widget to turn DevMode to “On” (button should turn green)
  6. Click and hold the mouse button down anywhere on your string of Festive Lights
  7. Without letting go of the mouse button, press the F12 key (or whatever your Dashboard hotkey is) and exit Dashboard
  8. Voilà! You’ve magically dragged your Widget out onto the desktop.
  9. Admit that this is awesome, go back to the Interdimensional Media site and make a donation (this part is optional, of course, but supporting great little apps like this encourages future development and boosts your holiday karma)
  10. Contact Jeremy Williams and wish him a happy holiday season for making it possible to drag your Festive Lights onto your desktop so easily.

Banishing the Festive Lights to the place from whence they came is simple enough, too: just hold down the option key, and you’ll see the little X appear near the top left corner of your lights. Click on the X, lights disappear.

Time to get in the holiday spirit, everyone. Enjoy your lights!

14 Comments

  1. 10 December 2006
    Reply

    And I guess we PC Microsoft losers are left in the dark, dreary world of non-festive dashboards and desktops. Enjoy. I’ll just go ahead and light some candles if nobody minds and perhaps burn a little sage to alienate evil, little widgets who decide they might want to infect my computer with spyware and malware and trojans, whilst you…you and the rest of you Mackies sit pretty on your apple butts…with your little festively lighted widgets illuminating the holiday season.

  2. 10 December 2006
    Reply

    And I guess we PC Microsoft losers are left in the dark, dreary world of non-festive dashboards and desktops. Enjoy. I’ll just go ahead and light some candles if nobody minds and perhaps burn a little sage to alienate evil, little widgets who decide they might want to infect my computer with spyware and malware and trojans, whilst you…you and the rest of you Mackies sit pretty on your apple butts…with your little festively lighted widgets illuminating the holiday season.

  3. 11 December 2006
    Reply

    It always amazes me that peecee users would rather continue on grumbling and complaining about how their pc doesn’t work as well as a Mac, instead of just… getting a Mac.

    It also suprises me that an artist is on a PC. I thought that was magnetically impossible.

  4. 11 December 2006
    Reply

    It always amazes me that peecee users would rather continue on grumbling and complaining about how their pc doesn’t work as well as a Mac, instead of just… getting a Mac.

    It also suprises me that an artist is on a PC. I thought that was magnetically impossible.

  5. 13 December 2006
    Reply

    Yeah, well, as I’m a musician and record producer the Mac’s kinda a requirement.

    Love the letter to Bill.

  6. 13 December 2006
    Reply

    Oh, and it’s a myth about Macs being expensive… everyone I send to the Apple store is shocked at how low the prices are, especially now.

  7. 13 December 2006
    Reply

    Yeah, well, as I’m a musician and record producer the Mac’s kinda a requirement.

    Love the letter to Bill.

  8. 13 December 2006
    Reply

    Oh, and it’s a myth about Macs being expensive… everyone I send to the Apple store is shocked at how low the prices are, especially now.

  9. […] Turkey is business-as-usual on the 25th, and it’s very odd indeed the first time you experience this. You wake up on Christmas morning and nothing feels different, nothing feels special. In the morning you see people heading to work as if it were any other day (and to them that’s exactly what it is). I have to admit, for the first couple of years I enjoyed this immensely. I’ve never been a fan of Christmas, and it was nice to have a break from the madness of it. This year, however, I’ll admit I’ve been trying to inject a bit of holiday spirit into the atmosphere. I haven’t gone as far as buying a Christmas tree (which you can get here fairly inexpensively), but I have a playlist of holiday songs, and I’ve tricked out my computer desktop beyond all belief. That’s enough for me, really. […]

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