Festivitas adds snow, Shortcuts, iPhone widgets to its holiday package

Let it snow!

Last year Developer Simon Støvring released Festivitas, a delightful app that lets you adorn your Mac’s Dock and Menu Bar with holiday lights.

This year, Støvring has outdone himself. There’s a new update for Festivitas for Mac that adds fully customizable snowfalls, including size of flakes, snow amount, fall speed, wind speed and direction. You can even determine how much (if any) the snowflakes will be repelled by your pointer!

And Festivitas now has Shortcuts support, which (when combined with MacOS Tahoe automations) can let you turn the lights or snow on and off based on events occurring on or off your Mac.

The first thing I did is built a Shortcut that randomly chooses whether it’s going to snow or not. I set a 10% chance for snow, and if it hits, it chooses a random amount of snow and wind to add.

A shortcut that will start Festivitas snowing… one time in ten. (Early versions of Festivitas required a random number between 0 and 1; now it accepts 0 to 100.)

Unfortunately, running an automation every n minutes is not offered as an option even in Tahoe, so I had to add this line to my crontab in the Terminal:

*/20 * * * * shortcuts run "Random Snowfall"

Now every 20 minutes my Mac will give me a 10% chance at a surprise snowfall, which (I have scientifically calculated) is the exactly right amount to surprise and delight me when it does happen.

It’s a lot easier if you don’t want the random dice flip—you could, for example, use Shortcuts to tell Festivitas to turn on the lights at 4pm every day and start the snow at 5pm. Or whenever. Festivitas for Mac is available now for a suggested price of €4.

Meanwhile, on iOS and iPadOS, Støvring has introduced an alternate version of Festivitas that lets you build widgets surrounded by animated holiday lights.