Holiday Lights™ (based on the wildly popular Xmas Lights program) is an entertaining application that places flashing light bulbs around the edge of your screen, as though a (well-insulated) elf crawled into your computer through the disk drive slot and stapled them there. The lights flash in the background while you continue to work; it’s not just a screen-saver! The “bulbs” include standard Christmas tree lights, chili peppers, stockings, holly, snowmen, happy faces, and more — and you can create your own bulbs using ResEdit or a similar program. Is it useful? Well... okay, no. Is it really cool? Absolutely!
Want more holiday fun? You got it: Holiday Lights also includes cheery background music and a built-in snowy screen saver to put you in the holiday spirit. It’s a multimedia extravaganza!
Holiday Lights is an application designed to be left running in the background while you work. Using it is simple: just open the Holiday Lights application, then switch to your other applications and continue working.
You can open the Holiday Lights application automatically when you turn on your computer by checking “Launch at System Startup” in the File menu — this places an alias to Holiday Lights in your Startup Items folder (inside your System Folder). Simply uncheck this menu item to remove the alias file and stop Holiday Lights from launching automatically.
To adjust the Holiday Lights settings once it’s running, or to quit Holiday Lights, choose “Holiday Lights” from the application menu (at the right end of the menu bar). You can then use any of the Holiday Lights menu commands.
The settings menu contains items allowing you to configure the bulbs on the edges of your screen (Bulb Factory), to set up the screen saver (Snow Blower), and to control the background music (Music Box).
Bulb Factory
The Bulb Factory window shows you a miniature version of your screen, with boxes at the edges where you can place the bulbs. In the middle of this window is the bulb list, showing the bulbs included with Holiday Lights. To place one or more of these bulbs on an edge of your screen, simply click on a bulb or its description and drag it to one of the outer boxes. (To remove a bulb from a box, just click on it and drag it back to the center bulb list.)
The top and bottom boxes can hold up to six different bulbs; the left and right boxes each hold up to four bulbs. The sequence of bulbs you place in these boxes will be repeated to fill the sides of your real screen after you close the Bulb Factory window.
In addition to the boxes at the sides, you’ll see a smaller box in each corner. Bulbs placed here only appear in the corner, rather than repeating on the side. You might use this feature to place a single sprig of holly in each of the four corners of your screen, for example.
One final note about the Bulb Factory: if you pay your shareware fee, you’ll receive lots of shiny new bulbs (including quite a few that are useful year-round)! You’ll get all these (and more):
Snow Blower Screen Saver
The Snow Blower allows you to set up the screen saver (and yes, we do know that it doesn’t look like a real snow blower; sorry ’bout that). It’s pretty self-explanatory; just remember that Holiday Lights can only do the screen saving thing when it’s running (because it’s an application that you run, rather than an extension that’s present all the time).
Music Box
The Music Box lets you control the background music. You can choose when you hear the music, set the volume, pick the songs you like, and preview (pre-hear?) the songs. Again, most of it is self-explanatory; the songs that are “on” have a check mark next to them — click the check mark area to turn a song off or on again. If you want to listen to a song while you’re in the music box, just click on its name.
By the way, did we mention that you get more nifty goodies if you pay for Holiday Lights, including more music files?
Memory Usage
We’ll admit it: Holiday Lights uses up quite a bit of memory when it’s open and running (560k or more). Multimedia extravaganzas are like that. The default memory partition size for Holiday Lights works well for all the bulbs and music we include with both the trial and the paid versions. But if you use a large number of bulbs in addition to those that come with Holiday Lights, you might need to increase the Holiday Lights partition size by 50-100k (the program will tell you if this is necessary). And remember: you can quit Holiday Lights at any time if you need the memory it’s using; there’s no need to restart your computer.
Bulb Files
The Bulb Files folder contains the bulbs Holiday Lights places on your screen. Holiday Lights won’t work unless you have a Bulb Files folder with at least one bulb file in it. If you get a new bulb file, just throw it in the Bulb Files folder; it will be available the next time you run Holiday Lights.
You can actually place any file (or an alias to any file) in the Bulb Files folder, and Holiday Lights will allow you to use the icons in that file as bulbs. Holiday Lights looks for 'cicn' and 'icl8' resources in these files, which are pretty standard. If you have a file that you know contains some icons, give it a try! Some such bulbs may look… well, odd, because the icons weren’t designed to be used as bulbs, but many icons work very well.
Music Files
The Music Files folder contains the background music you hear if you have QuickTime installed. (To hear the music with high-quality instruments, you also need QuickTime Musical Instruments. Both are available free from the usual places: online, user groups, etc.) Holiday Lights will work without the Music Files folder, but you won’t hear any music, or see any songs listed in the Music Box.
Music files are really just QuickTime MIDI files, using the standard QuickTime MIDI format. Many such files are available from online sources, and Apple’s MoviePlayer (included with QuickTime) can convert any MIDI file to the correct format. Just toss these files into the Music Files folder, then use the Music Box to turn them on.
Known Problems
If you change the size of your monitor while Holiday Lights is running, the bulbs stay in their old location. You can quit and reopen Holiday Lights to fix this if it bothers you.
On Power Macs, Holiday Lights triggers a write to nil when using the EvenBetterBusError extension — if you don’t know what that means, you can ignore this part; it’s a geeky programmer thing. The bug is actually in the Music Architecture of QuickTime 2.0 and 2.1 (which is pretty unstable, unfortunately). It should be fixed in QuickTime 2.2, available “soon.” If it happens to you, my advice is to type “dx;g” and ignore it. Turning off the music eliminates it too.
Changes in This Version
Here’s a list of technical changes to Holiday Lights, for those interested in such things.
Version 3.0.1:
Added “Launch at System Startup” to File menu.
The installer no longer places an alias in the Startup Items folder (it’s now controlled by new menu above).
The Snow Blower now uses graphics that are slightly inferior (the flakes no longer go behind the masks of the bulbs), but require much less available memory (almost none, in fact). It also uses less than half the processor time of the previous version.
Temporary memory is no longer used for loading bulb icons — this occasionally seemed to fail on machines running RAMDoubler.
Bulb icons are now only loaded once, even when used in multiple places.
Now displays an informative message if the program cannot startup.
Now displays a message if you’re using a version of QuickTime prior to 2.0.
Fixed a bug that could cause a crash in very low memory situations when pressing “OK” in Bulb Factory.
QuickTime movie files are now closed properly as soon as they can be (rather than much later).
Now displays a message if it detects a badly formatted bulb file (it used to just suggest that “memory is low”).
If memory is low, the program will not play music, start the screen saver, or allow you to open any new windows.
Holding the shift key when starting the program turns off everything (allowing you to launch it and turn features on one-by-one if it won't launch normally with everything turned on [the default]).
Increased the partition size by 30k so that it works “out of the box” with additional bulbs & music.
Holiday Lights is Shareware
Holiday Lights is shareware; if you use for more than a few days, you must pay the $15.00 (US) shareware fee. To do so, choose “Order Form” from the Holiday Lights File menu and follow the instructions you’ll find there.
Registered users receive free updates (delivered by e-mail), new bulbs and music as soon as we receive your order, a serial number to eliminate the shareware reminder message, and an official Holiday Lights disk.
Other Tiger Technologies Programs
If you enjoy Holiday Lights, we think you’ll like our other programs, too. All of them are shareware, and all are available from user groups, online services, etc. And if you pay for them at the same time you pay for Holiday Lights, you’ll receive a large discount (automatically calculated for you on the order form). Here’s a quick description of each to help you decide if you’d like to download them:
Menuette replaces the boring words in your menu bar (such as File and Edit) with nifty color icons, saving space and giving your menu bar a cool new look. Menuette includes almost 150 pre-made icons, and you can add your own if you like using the built-in icon editor. Menuette also allows you to choose any font you like for your menu titles and menu items. Here’s how your menu bar might look with Menuette installed:
Speed Beep chooses a random sound to play each time your Macintosh beeps, and prevents the Macintosh from “locking up” while the beep sound is playing. You can choose the likelihood that a given sound will play, allowing you to occasionally hear those long sounds that get annoying when played often.
Helium allows you to assign hot keys to balloon help. Instead of using the help menu to choose “Show Balloons” and “Hide Balloons” every time you want to read a single help balloon, you just hold down a key combination and the balloons appear — release the hot keys and balloons disappear. You can also choose any font and size that you’d like for the balloon help text.
Getting in Touch With Us
Please contact us if you have any questions, comments, bug reports — whatever. We vastly prefer e-mail: you can reach us at tigers@tigertech.com.
If you don’t have e-mail, you can send paper to:
Tiger Technologies
PO Box 21271
Oakland, CA 94620-1271
USA
If you have internet access, you should also visit our World Wide Web site: http://www.tigertech.com/. Here you’ll find all sorts of extras, including new bulbs and music. Our ftp address is ftp://ftp.tigertech.com/.
We hope you enjoy using Holiday Lights as much as we enjoyed making it. Thanks for letting us share it with you!
