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Let It Snow! -- Decorating Your Mac For Christmas Traditional Christmas Music On Your Mac - And A Lot More Besides Holiday Entertainment Or A Great Gift Idea - Star Wars Trilogy VCD Review
Let It Snow! -- Decorating Your Mac For Christmas Snow for Macintosh 1.0.0 I like snow. Well, actually I'm not so crazy about it when there's a lot to shovel, or when my car gets stuck in it, but I like a nice blanket of snow on the ground in the winter, and I love going for walks in falling snow, when the air turns hazy white and you can't hear a thing but snowflakes.
As I type this, there is a wonderful little snowfall happening on my computer screen, blanketing a pastoral Christmas landscape thanks to a little 110k freeware utility by Rick Jansen called Snow for Macintosh v 1.0.0, and a desktop picture called "Country Home Wishes," which you can find along with a selection of other Christmas desktop pictures here:
Besides the snow building up on the bottom of the screen and on top of open windows, Santa and his reindeer, led by a red-nosed Rudolph, flying through the desktop sky, buffeted occasionally by strong headwinds. These effects and more are customizable in Snow for Macintosh's preferences dialog. Rick Jansen says that the whole process of making it snow on your desktop is a bit CPU intensive, so if you find that Snow slows down your machine you can choose fewer snowflakes, no Santa, no Christmas tree or no Snow at all. I haven't noticed any slowdown at all with a fairly intense snowfall happening on my PowerBook G3 233. Rick also notes that Snow runs fastest if it is selected as the frontmost application. If it runs in another application's background it will run notably slower (not that noticeably on this G3 machine). You can make it the frontmost application by choosing it from the applications menu if you feel like some heavy snowing. <P> Rick says that the first Macintosh program he ever wrote was a computer Christmas card that showed a picture of a snowman and falling snow. Later a Father Christmas in his sleigh was added. Rick converted this to an undying desk accessory in 1988. Xsnow was born in December 1993. The X-windows version has been around for a few years now, a new Macintosh version occurred in 1996, now followed by the Windows version. Snow for Macintosh 1.0.0 is freeware. You can download Snow for Macintosh 1.0.0 from Rick Jansen's Website:
Snow 2.4 Another, somewhat different, Macintosh snow utility is Dave Warker's http://www.warker.com Snow 2.4, a small, free application that drifts snowflakes down your monitor screen accompanied by the sound of sleigh bells or Christmas music (or silence if you wish). You can select the desired snowstorm intensity, from gentle flurries to blizzard conditions. Snow 2.4 supports several different styles of flakes. However, unlike Snow for Macintosh 1.0.0, the snow in Snow 2.4 does not accumulate on windows, and the snowstorm and bells, music, all stop when you're working in another application. You can adjust the volume of the jingling sleigh bells, or turn them off completely The Tunes menu requires QuickTime 2.0 or later (QT3 or better is recommended). You can add more tunes by placing MIDI files in the Snow Tunes folder. You can download Snow 2.4 from Dave Warker's Website:
Christmas Desktop Pictures 1.0 Christmas Desktop Pictures allows users to drag entire folders of desktop pictures onto the "Desktop Pictures" control panel's picture screen. Then, every time you start up or restart the Mac, the program will choose a random picture from that folder. These pictures look best on monitors set to thousands or millions of colors. These pictures are set as 640 x 480 pixels, but can be seen in full under many different settings. System requirements:
Christmas Desktop Pictures 1.0 is $8 shareware. For more information or to download, visit:
Cursor8 Christmas 1.5 Christopher Lund and Anthony Wu's Cursor8 Christmas 1.5 is a set of three Christmas cursors, "Undecorated Christmas Tree," "Decorated Christmas Tree," and "Wreath." System requirements:
Cursor8 Christmas 1.5 is $5 shareware For more information or to download, visit:
Christi's Tree 1.1 Christi's Tree is a Christmas tree for your Macintosh.
For more information or to download, visit:
Ecclesial Calendar (PPC) 1.0 Ecclesial Calendar is a small program written in cooperation with George Gallagher. It displays the dates for Easter, Ash Wednesday, Ascension Day, Pentecost and the day of the week on which Christmas occurs for any year between 1584 and 2190. Ecclesial Calendar is free, but if you find it useful, you should donate a small sum to the trust fund, set up by George and his wife Margaret, on behalf of their daughter Mary Catherine, who is autistic. The money raised by the fund will be used to send Mary Catherine to the Option Institute in the United States. For more information or to download, visit:
SnowBall 1.0 SnowBall is a snow globe for your desktop. For more information or to download, visit:
Xmas Lights Xmas Lights is a control panel consisting of a string of colorful, blinking Christmas lights that hang beneath the menu bar. For more information or to download, visit:
Holiday Lights Holiday Lights strings rows of Christmas tree bulbs around the edges of your screen, with festive music playing the background. It even includes a screen saver with gently falling snow and other seasonal choices to put you in the holiday spirit. The colorful lights flash on your desktop while you continue to work, so it's not just a screen saver. New In Holiday Lights Version 5.1:
The music now supports MP3 and AIFF files as well as MIDI songs. It supports aliases; you can put an alias to your folder of MP3 songs into the Holiday Lights Music folder and it will work. (Requires QuickTime 4.) Added a "None" screen saver animation option. Changes to the preferences will be correctly saved even if your computer does not get shut down properly. Worked around a limitation in the Mac OS that could cause your bulbs to disappear if they were drawing on top of all windows and the outline of the bulbs was very complex. (The window region was greater than 64K, which caused the Mac not to draw it at all „ fixed by using four separate windows, each of which can be up to 64K.) Fixed a number of minor inconsistencies to do with what happens when you turn off or on a song when it's currently being randomly played. Other minor bug fixes. There are forty different bulbs to choose from (and you can add hundreds more) — you can mix and match them however you want. You create the bulb patterns around the edges of your screen by simply clicking and dragging bulbs in the Holiday Lights Bulb Factory. System Requirements:
The program is shareware, so you can try it free of charge and pay the $19.95 one-time shareware fee only if you decide to keep it. Also, if you know somebody else who would enjoy a copy of Holiday Lights, you can use the gift ordering page to send Holiday Lights for 50% off the normal price -- $9.95 -- and it's delivered instantly. For more information or to download, visit:
Holiday Entertainment Or A Great Gift Idea - Star Wars Trilogy VCD Review
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