The Smorgasbord of Douglas Bell

Hope you’ve been feeling enlightened with all of the lights I’ve been showing off on here recently. Well, I’ve got one more for you, and tomorrow, I promise I’ll start showing you how to deck your desktops with some non-lights apps. But for today, we come to one of the most important ways to personalize your Mac to make it your own: the screensaver. There’s a lot of great Christmas/holiday screensavers out there that I’ve tried and enjoyed, and I’ll be reviewing a good number of them this month, but today’s review focuses on the one that I’m actually using full time–the NightLights screensaver by Skyrocket Software.

So what is NightLights? Let’s just call it the best way to get holiday lights on your screensaver, with lots of customizable options. As a shareware screensaver, the paid version has some additional features, so I’ll focus on the free features first. NightLights offers you two bulb sizes: both C7/C9 (large) bulbs and mini (more common in real-world) bulbs, with the colors red and green available to choose from. (You can use both or only one of them.) Or, if you like Apple a lot, there is also an Apple logo novelty shape which you can use as well. NightLights gives you complete control over the size of the lights and the number of lights to draw, and you can choose how fast the lights blink (or choose to have them blink at individually random speeds), or just keep the lights steady. NightLights also lets you choose to frame your lights around the edges of your screen or scatter the lights across your screen. (Or select both options and NightLights will randomly pick one each time it runs.)

However, for a totally-worth it $5 registration, you can unlock a number of additional features in NightLights. This includes the addition of blue, white, yellow, and orange colored lights (and again, you can mix and match the activated colors) and eight additional novelty shapes (heart, turkey, snowman, Santa, holly, candy cane, star, and Star of David) that you can add–in fact, the addition of these gives you numerous options for using NightLights year-round for various holidays. But the eye candy just gets better. You can choose to enable the falling of snowflakes, leaves, and/or raindrops (and control their falling speed), and even upload a background image to use as a scene, or turn on “View Desktop” mode and your own desktop becomes the background. NightLights will also let you write a message (like “Happy Holidays!”) that will be displayed in the center of the screensaver in the font and color of your choosing, and you can even pick an audio file or playlist from iTunes or from the Finder to play in the background of your screensaver.

Yep, NightLights packs quite a punch if you’re looking to brighten up your screensaver with some beautifully-rendered holiday lights. It’s definitely worth a look if you’re interested in decking out your screensaver.

Be sure to check out other decoration tips for your Mac in my Deck the Desktops blogging series, occurring daily during December 1-25 here on Webmacster87.info.