Festivitas lets you decorate your Apple devices with holiday lights and snow

Summary

If you want to bring a bit of holiday cheer to the screen you use the most, you’ll get a kick out of the newly updated Festivitas app for Apple devices. Originally designed to add holiday lights to your Mac’s desktop, this popular indie app has been updated this year with several new features, most notably a version of the app that brings its sparkling, colorful lights to iOS devices for the first time. With the new Festivitas app for iPhone and iPad, you can add and customize a string of holiday lights on your device’s Home Screen using iOS widgets. The lights can frame your favorite personal photo (or perhaps a holiday image you dig up on Pinterest), and you can opt to make the widget transparent so it blends in with your background. While seasonal apps can sometimes be low-quality cash grabs, developer Simon Støvring puts genuine effort and thoughtfulness into Festivitas’ design — and doesn’t charge an arm and a leg, either. Instead, the app is available for free to consumers, with premium features that can be unlocked for a fair price of between $3.99 and $9.99. (You get to choose the price that works best for you.) On both macOS and iOS, you can customize the holiday lights in multiple ways, beyond picking their colors and flashing pattern. You can adjust the cable’s thickness, its drop width and height, and choose from pre-made color palettes like Candy Cane, Winter Snow, Elf, and others, or you can design your own. You can also make finer adjustments to things like the colors’ hue or temperature, the speed of the flashes, and the spacing between the lights. Another perk is that you’ll be able to use the lights again outside of the winter holidays, as you can now change the bulb shape to designs like a bat, clover, Easter egg, heart, ghost, star, “2026,” and more throughout the year. This lets you continue to enjoy the app for other holidays and special events — there’s even a “WWDC” bulb for celebrating Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in June. Another ...