Category: Apps

Decorate Your Mac For The Holidays with Festivitas

Decorate your Mac for the holidays with Festivitas.

In case you hadn’t noticed, ’tis the season for holiday decorations. (Although we’ve put up our tree without decorating it yet.) For those who might feel a bit grumpy after staring at their screens all day and want a little holiday distraction on their Macs, Simon B. Støvring has created a clever little app that allows you to bring a little holiday cheer to your Mac. It’s called Festivitas.

CleanShot 2024-12-04 at 10.07.37@2x.

Festivitas allows you to string some lights on your screen by adding strings of blinking lights along your Menu Bar and/or dock. You can configure various settings including the size of the lights, the cable thickness, the distance between lights, and the patterns and speed that the lights do their blinking, as well as the colors. You can hang the lights from your Menu Bar and have them float above your Dock, or choose one or the other.

Festivis Mac App displaying lights on your Mac task bar and dock

You can check out the App at this link and pick it up for a song.

Clever stuff from Simon and a nice little holiday treat, because we could all use a little whimsy and a bit of delightful distraction this holiday season.

You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above. 

Croissant is a Treat for Social Media Cross-Posting

Croissant is a sweet and simple app for social media cross-posters.

With the social media world still very much atwitter and scattered among various platforms in the wake of Twitter’s destruction at the hands of Elon Musk, some users like myself traverse across the multiple platforms seeking to replace it. That’s all well and good as far as it goes, but it presents a first world problem of having to post separately for those who do.

To the rescue comes Croissant. A lovely little app from indie developers Ben McCarthy and Aaron Vegh that simplifies cross-posting to Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky. While there are promises a plenty of interactivity via ActivityPub, that’s still by and large a waiting game. I also don’t think buying into a protocol will be the simple answer most think it will be for differing complex platform agendas. Meanwhile Croissant serves up a tasty treat for cross-posters.

In this first version the action is sweet and simple as is the design. Feed in your account credentials and cross-post away. You can add photos, hashtags, and you can tag someone in your post assuming you know their handle and it’s the same across multiple platforms. Swipe right to delete a post, swipe left to create a thread.

You can choose to spill out your toots, threads, and posts to all three, or pick and choose where each pearl of wisdom drops. You can also save drafts and create threaded posts. For those who manage multiple accounts on any of the platforms it provides a one-stop solution. Croissant also delivers the now table stakes of different color schemes and your choice of icons.

I’d like to add more to this quick review, but there’s no need. In its first iteration Croissant does what it does simply enough and that is its elegance and its utility. The developers have a road map for adding new features in the future, but I hope hanging on to the “buttery smooth” simplicity remains a priority.

You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above. 

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