14 DAY TRIAL // The holiday season is back again and everybody is out shopping for new Christmas decorations to get the house ready for the visit of the old jolly Santa. Apart from decorating their homes and making the best Christmas tree, some people are also beginning to be preoccupied with how their Mac is looking.
As we all know, there is no better time for hunting down new, entertaining and Xmas-themed apps, because a Mac not ready for the holiday season is a Mac that will ruin all your Christmas spirit.
As the holiday fever has also spread in my house and has also taken over my Mac, I decided to make a short list of applications you could download and use on your own to bring the holiday spirit on to your desktop. I already have an app that creates a snow flake mayhem on the desktop running on my machine, but, unfortunately, I only get to see it for a few moments each day, because all my screen background is covered by the apps I’m working with.
These types of applications are necessary if you do not want to forget about Santa and his reindeer while you are using your computer. Some of them are screen savers that will animate your idle desktop and fill it with snow, others are applications with no particular use other than doing something Christmas-related, while the rest will only look good on your machine.
Although you will dismiss some of them for their sheer lack of usability, you will simply love the others only because they fit in perfectly with the holiday spirit and the atmosphere it creates around this season.
First, let us start with the screen saver batch. LotsaSnow is a free and very clean-looking screen saver that will display snowflakes falling down on your Mac’s idle desktop. Its most interesting feature is that every such item displayed on your screen background will be unique. You can say goodbye to the days when each one of these snowflakes drawn by your utility was an exact copy of all the others already falling down on your Mac’s screen.
Scattered Flurries is another free screen saver that will display an OpenGL-rendered snowfall on your idle screen background. The snowflakes in this utility will not only fall down like lumps of snow, but they will also be blown away by a gentle winter wind.
Let It Snow is the last utility of the batch and it is the simplest one. The only thing it does is to display snow falling down on your Mac’s desktop, but it does it with style and it looks really good.
The screen savers are one of the best ways to tweak your Mac to look a little more Xmas-ready, because during Christmas you will stay at home with your family and will not have to use your machine. This way your utility will pop up on your desktop a lot more than it usually does and, this time around, you will have the time to watch it do its job without having to abruptly interrupt it to go back to work.
Sno is a whole other type of application, though it will do pretty much the same things as the screen savers presented above do. The tool will draw falling down snowflakes directly on your desktop, while you are working on your Mac.
The nice and interesting thing is that it will move out of your way and will not get across the active application, as it will display snow on those parts of the screen you are not using at a certain moment.
You may think Sno is boring and eye catching and will not allow you to concentrate on a task (and this is probably the case with this app), nevertheless after trying it for a while you will get used to it and it will not distract you anymore.
Last but not least, I guess most of you will absolutely love this utility, especially if you will not mind some little snowflakes falling down gently on your screen.
Snowflakes, as its developer says, is a “Little application that puts the beautiful sight of falling snow on your Mac's screen while you work.” In few words, it does exactly the same things as Sno, though with a little twist – the tool will allow you to customize the number of snowflakes that fall down on your desktop, as well as their speed.
Be warned though, it will eat up lots of CPU cycles, so do not run it if you plan to also make use of some CPU intensive app that actually allows you to do something useful.
Santa Menu is a free Mac application that does only two things, namely it sits in your menubar and ho-ho-hos from time to time. That’s it and, despite carrying out only these two actions, this is the application that does them the best. What better reason to download it and run it on your own Mac?
MacLampsX allows you to quickly decorate your Mac’s edges with light strings with many different bulb styles. Some people hate it because of its high distraction score, whereas others love it exactly for that reason. I suppose MacLampsX has to be one of those acquired tastes. You will just have to download and try it on your Mac and see what you think about a light bulb-invaded desktop.
X-MasTree is “a 159% free” application that will allow you to design and display your own floating Xmas tree on your screen background. What could be better for all you Christmas maniacs out there than to have your own personalized Christmas tree on your desktop?
Moreover, when it comes to talking about features, X-MasTree offers many, including the option to choose which color lights to display, ornaments, lighting modes, and a badge rendering the days left until Christmas.
Do you know other apps that could bring the Xmas spirit on a Mac? Have you found another utility that could be a perfect match for the Xmas tree next to your desk? Share them with the rest of us in the comments.
