A merry freeware Christmas
Festive freeware seems a bit slow in arriving this year, but we were able to find three that should bring Christmas cheer to your Mac:
Xmas Mail Stationery provides a template for Apple’s Mail app with a Christmas theme. You’ll need Leopard or Snow Leopard to make it work. It’s a nice addition to the stationery pre-installed in Mail since Apple doesn’t provide anything specific to the holiday season. I found installation a bit of a chore, though. According to the instructions, the file can be placed in one of two folders. The first one didn’t exist and the second one didn’t work. I wound up creating my own folder with the appropriate path and it worked fine.
By the way, the photos can easily be changed with drag and drop — just like other stationery.
Update: More Christmas stationery is available from aMac Island. This package includes six themes, and is much easier to install.
Festive Lights is one of the more amazing widgets I’ve come across, featuring a slew of options and almost endless customizations — all so you can cheer yourself up from time to time with some Christmas lights in the dashboard. Installation, as with any widget, was a snap. What was not apparent at first was the tiny “tag” hanging from the top left with an “i” in the middle of it. Yes, this is where you click to set patterns, speeds and colours for your lights. You can even download various lightsets that other people have created or make your own. And if you’d like to display them on the desktop — well, there’s an app for that.
That little tag on the left is where the magic happens. This shows the widget with the maple leaf lightset installed.
Jubilee screensaver creates mesmerizing abstractions of holidays lights ranging from subtle to vivid. Just double-click to install, then test it in System Preferences the way you would any other screensaver. Clicking on the Options button gives you a choice of four themes: Vivid rainbow hues, Chanukah cool blue and white, natural unadulterated glow, and creepy Christmas-Halloween mashup.
I actually prefer the Chanukah theme, but I couldn’t get a screenshot of it.
So there you have it — three freeware apps to make merry with your Mac.
Posted Friday, December 4, 2009 in Reviews
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