If you’re looking to bring some holiday cheer to your 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 desktop, this popular indie app has been updated this year with several new features, most notably a version of the app that brings its twinkling, colorful lights to iOS devices for the first time.
With the new Festivitas app for iPhone and iPad, you can add and customize an array of holiday lights to your device’s home screen using iOS widgets. The lights can frame your favorite personal photo (or maybe a holiday image you discover on Pinterest), and you can choose to make the widget transparent to blend in with your background.
While seasonal apps can sometimes be low-quality cash grabs, developer Simon Støvring put genuine effort and thought into the design of Festivitas — and he doesn’t charge an arm or a leg. Instead, the app is available for free to consumers, with premium features that can be unlocked for a fair price between $3.99 and $9.99. (You can choose the price that suits you best.)
On both macOS and iOS, you can customize your holiday lights in a number of ways beyond choosing their colors and flashing pattern. You can customize the cable thickness, width and drop height and choose from pre-made color palettes like Candy Cane, Winter Snow, Elf and more, or you can design your own.
You can also make finer adjustments to things like hue or color temperature, flash speed, and the distance between lights.
Another plus is that you’ll be able to reuse the lights outside of the winter holidays, as you can now change the shape of the bulb into designs like bat, shamrock, Easter egg, heart, ghost, star, “2026” and more all year round. This allows you to continue enjoying the app for other holidays and special events — there’s even a “WWDC” light bulb to celebrate Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June.
Another new feature this year is a snow effect for the Mac app, which adds floating snowflakes to your desktop. You can customize this experience by making the flakes drift gently down towards your dock, or increase the amount of snow, fall speed, flake size and wind, turning it into something akin to a blizzard. You can also choose to have the snow fall on top of everything on the screen or just on your desktop itself.
Both the snow and the lights can react to your mouse as you move it across the screen, either pushing the snow away or raising and dropping the lights, for some interactive fun. Additionally, turning on the lights makes it easier to see your browser tabs when you need to click on them, although you can turn this feature off if you prefer.
If you’re more of a techie, you’ll appreciate the app’s Shortcuts integration that lets you automate when the lights and snow turn on. This allows you to do things like turn on snow based on the day’s forecast or display lights alongside your music and more.
There are plenty of other apps that offer holiday themes, widgets, and icons for your iPhone, but there’s one quirk about Festivitas that’s worth downloading for anyone into personalizing their home screen or desktop.
