As this always-grueling commercialism part of the Christmas season comes to a close, perhaps we could all benefit from some laughs as we move ahead to Christmas Day tomorrow. That said, here’s two hilarious clips from the old show Whose Line is it Anyway? making fun at Santa Claus. Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a good night!

Tags: funny, press conference, Santa, sound effects, Video, Whose Line is it Anyway?, YouTube

Christmas Eve is now here, which means that Santa Claus has now begun his 26-hour journey across the planet, reaching every house around the world at midnight local time. He must be glad that mankind invented timezones so that he could spread his daunting task across 26 hours. But what if you want to keep track of him?

Meet NORAD Tracks Santa. While I have no idea if this is really a NORAD activity or people posing as NORAD, for the sake of this review, I’ll go along with the claim that it is. Essentially, NORAD claims to use 47 radar systems, many orbiting satellites (which detect the infrared signature coming off of Rudolph’s nose), a worldwide network of Santa cams, and when Santa reaches North America, a team of fighter jets to keep track of him. The result? On the NORAD Tracks Santa website, you can stay glued to a live-updating Google map that pinpoints Santa’s location every five minutes. Plus, every hour, NORAD releases a video of Santa from their Santa cams along with commentary from one of NORAD’s Christmas Eve Santa trackers.

Tracking Santa is actually a lot of fun, because you can also learn a bit of geography as you follow Santa on his journey. Many of the videos share a number of interesting facts about the places that Santa visits and mention significant landmarks. You can also click on the gift boxes on the map as Santa travels to see pictures of the various locations he visits or click on a link to read more about that location on Wikipedia.

Finally, if you want to try something really fun, you can track Santa in Google Earth. All you have to do is download and install Google Earth and the NORAD Tracks Santa KML file, open it in Google Earth, and every 10-15 seconds Google Earth will fly you along to follow Santa’s path, and even see him in 3D. Very cool.

So why are you still reading this review? Go check out NORAD Tracks Santa, and have a very Merry Christmas (or Happy Holidays)!

Tags: Deck the Desktops, Google Earth, maps, NORAD, Santa, tracking, Videos, website

The good folks at SkyRocket Software don’t stop delivering their great screensavers, and this year, they’ve got a new one to boot: a very interesting screensaver called XMasBotZ. This screensaver is like having a virtual 3D Santa bobblehead that talks to you, and can even recognize you when you talk to it.

Sound intriguing? Probably not, but read on anyway. This animated Santa head twists and turns in 3D while snowflakes fall in different directions behind him–some of which even fly right off of your screen. You can either set Santa to say various phrases (using the default OS X system voice) every few seconds, or if your Mac has a built-in or attached microphone, it can detect whenever you speak to the computer and Santa will speak right back.

The additional value comes in when you register the screensaver for $5. When registered, you can replace Santa with a snowman, a reindeer, a tree, a star, or a candy cane. (Don’t ask me if the tree, star, or candy cane talk to you; I haven’t registered this so I haven’t tried it.) Or, you can tell the screensaver to pick a random bot among those six. You can also turn on more decorations to go with the snowflakes, such as lights and/or stars. In addition, you can change the background color or add an image, and completely customize what the characters say by creating your own custom phrases and customizing their timing.

So there you have it, another cool screensaver with a talking Santa. If that sounds interesting to you, check it out.

Tags: Deck the Desktops, Santa, screen saver, Skyrocket Software, talking

It’s Widget Wednesday once again! And what could be better than a widget that doesn’t do anything? Meet Virtual Fruitcake. Just like the real thing, Virtual Fruitcake just sits there, untouched, uneaten, and forgotten. It doesn’t animate, it doesn’t tell you the time until Christmas, it just sits there in its highly-detailed fruitiness. And that’s all there is to it. It’s become a staple part of my Dashboard, just sitting there on the bottom of my Dashboard over the past few weeks, serving as a reminder for why I don’t like fruitcake at all.

Tags: Deck the Desktops, fruitcake, widget

Are you as upset as I am about how Apple killed the iCards service this past summer? At a loss for how you’re going to send out basic Christmas cards via e-mail this year? Is iPhoto’s holiday cards just a little bit overwhelming to figure out? Well then, I’ve got just the solution for you: PhotoCard, a nifty little freeware app for making simple holiday cards.

Okay, PhotoCard isn’t exactly an app that was intended to replace iCards. It was put together two years ago as part of the Holiday Cocoa Duel, but it lives on as a very nice, very simple way of putting cards together. PhotoCard comes with a small set of card templates that you can choose from, and you can also supposedly create your own templates as well, though I haven’t explored how to do this yet. Each template provides a place for you to add a photo and a place for you to write a text message. All you’ve gotta do is drag in a photo, and then move the photo around to arrange its position. A slider in the toolbar lets you resize the photo as needed. Then, write your message in the text box at the bottom of the window, and use the font drop-down, size sliders, text-color palette, and alignment buttons in the toolbar to edit it as you see fit. That’s all there is to it! Just export your card from the File menu, and PhotoCard will save it as a JPEG, ready for you to e-mail or do whatever you see fit.

Now, PhotoCard is obviously not the most full-featured card-creation app out there, and you could easily make much more sophisticated cards using other programs. But then again, iCards were also really basic, despite the plethora of other eCard sites out there. Yet iCards persisted…why? Because they were simple to use and send, and that’s where PhotoCard fits in. About the only major thing left out was a Media Browser to connect straight with iPhoto, but if you’re using OS X Leopard, you can actually work around that limitation: just go to File->Import Photo, and then choose Photos from under the Media section of the sidebar–that’ll get you access to the photos in your iPhoto library right there.

So if you’re looking for a quick and easy way to get photo cards sent out to your friends and family, give PhotoCard a try. It’s free, after all.

Tags: cards, Cocoa Duel, Deck the Desktops, iCards, PhotoCard, photos

When it comes to the holidays, there are plenty of screen savers out there to choose from. And so, when Apple picks a particular screen saver to show off in its retail stores, you can bet that’s a pretty big deal. And that’s just what they did a few years ago with the Snowfall screen saver.

Of all of the falling snow apps that I’ve reviewed, this one definitely takes the cake for having the most beautiful falling snow I’ve seen. Snowfall comes with many different types of flakes in many unique shapes and sizes, and as they fall, the twirl around in 3D, and are semi-transparent as they fall over each other. Quite beautiful and guaranteed to turn heads from onlookers observing the falling snow on your screen.

By default, the snow falls on a striped red background reminiscent of the developer’s website, but there are options that let you set whatever background color you like, and you can turn the stripes on or off. You can also change the speed of the falling snowflakes and the snowflake count (which might not be a bad idea since the default settings did get my processor revving up a bit), or you can even choose to bring in a background image instead. Plus, because this screen saver was constructed using Quartz Composer, if you have the Xcode Developer Tools installed, you can actually pop this screen saver open in Quartz Composer and customize it to your heart’s content.

Snowfall is freeware and a beautiful way to add some winter warmth to your Mac.

Tags: Deck the Desktops, Quartz, screensaver, snowfall

Snowflakes may be a fun app for getting snowfall on your desktop, but it’s not the only one. Snow for Mac OS X is another snowy application that I tried out last year, and it too is quite interesting. Its snow is much smaller and more generic than Snowflakes, but the app comes with a couple of other twists. Like the ability for snow to pile up on the bottom of your desktop (this works better when your Dock is set with hiding turned on) or on top of windows. Throw in the occasional occurrence of bushes for the snow to pile up on, a polar bear, and Santa flying in his sleigh, and that’ll give you quite a desktop.

The main thing about Snow is that it’s a bit of a tricky application to approach. There are a very large number of settings to tweak in its preferences to determine what features happen and what features don’t, as well as optimizing Snow’s performance for your computer, and there were a few features that I personally couldn’t figure out, such as how to get that snow to pile up on your windows. Plus, this app is shareware, and costs $10 after the 10 day trial. I ended up passing on this pick, but you may be interested in giving it a try.

Tags: Deck the Desktops, Desktop, polar bear, snow, snowfall

You can’t get into the Christmas spirit without having a little bit of fun. That’s why today’s app isn’t so much about decorating your desktop as it is about having a good time as you get into the Christmas spirit. It’s a cute little program called SantaSnaps, and it’s quite a bit of fun.

Two years ago, someone by the name of Jason Harris held a contest called A Holiday Cocoa Duel, in which a number of well-known Mac OS X developers held a week-long contest where each of them had to develop a holiday-themed OS X application and release it as open source. Each developer also named a charity that they wanted people who liked their app to donate to, and the developer who generated the most donations to his chosen charity won the duel and the rest of the developers gave him $20 worth of beer (well, $20 to be used for anything). The contest generated some cool apps and $2381.43 of donations to charity, and while many of the apps are no longer on the internet (in fact, I think that Santa’s Gizmo is the only app from this contest that has continued to be developed), a few are, and this cool app by John Casasanta (of iClip fame) was one of them.

SantaSnaps is basically Photo Booth for Christmas, which does mean that you’ll need an iSight or comparable webcam for it to work. When you open it up, you see yourself, via the webcam. However, instead of throwing in funny visual effects or trying to create a mask of your background that doesn’t work properly 99.5% of the time, SantaSnaps lets you add effects to make you look like Santa, a reindeer, the nutcracker, or some freaky combination of all of the above. Underneath the video of yourself is a wardrobe of things you can add to your picture: Santa’s hat, glasses, Santa’s white beard, an elf hat, elf ears, antlers, Rudolph’s red nose, a bow ribbon had, or the Nutcracker. Just select what you want to add, then fit yourself in the frame, and take the picture! Once you take the picture, SantaSnaps asks you to save it as a PNG image somewhere, which you can then do with as you please. Here’s me posing as Santa Claus:

Now, SantaSnaps isn’t very fully featured beyond that, but again, the developer only had a week to put this together and he did a fairly good job. However, you don’t have the ability to move the accessories around on the image; they stay in the place that they show up in, and you just have to move yourself to fit. Also, unlike Photo Booth, SantaSnaps does not save a library of the pictures that you take, rather, SantaSnaps has you save your picture immediately on your computer. If you want to do anything with it, like make it your account picture, your buddy picture, or save it in your iPhoto library, you have to do that manually. And, unlike Photo Booth, SantaSnaps does not make the whole screen flash white when it takes the picture.

Nevertheless, SantaSnaps is a lot of fun, and can generate some great pictures that you can use elsewhere in Christmas cards, or e-mails, or to provide an embarrassing image of yourself that you put on your own website for the whole world to see, like I just did. Check it out and start having some fun.

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.

Tags: accessories, Deck the Desktops, fun, iSight, Photo Booth, Pictures, SantaSnaps

They say that Frosty the Snowman was a jolly, happy soul. Well, I don’t know if that’s true or not (I choose not to be biased), but perhaps you should take the opportunity to invite his brother, Frosted the Snowman, and all of his copyright-free friends onto your computer! The Frosted screensaver is as far as you have to turn.

This great screensaver comes from the same folks who brought you the NightLights screensaver, but if you start to get a little sick of all of the lights everywhere, then this is a great screensaver to get the winter Christmas spirit going in your veins.

Frosted presents you with a snow scene in the woods with a gingerbread house in the background. Frosted the Snowman walks around the screen, waves, and even talks to you. Santa and “Rudy the Red-Nosed Reindeer” also make some appearances. The screensaver is complete with stereo winter sound effects that sound quite lifelike. The only disappointment here comes from the fact that the voices are actually synthesized speech, which means that both Frosted and Santa’s talking sounds like computer voices. But if you overlook that, they are quite cute. Of course, the screensaver does give you the options of muting Santa, muting Frosted, or muting all sound effects altogether. Another downside to this screensaver is that the screensaver takes a minute or so to load its various elements before the screensaver itself begins. Warning: This screensaver definitely asks for more CPU and GPU power for a better performance. It performed fine on my 2 GHz MacBook (with Intel GMA 960 integrated graphics) but the fans did whir up quite a bit to handle it.

All of that comes to you for free, but if you register for $5, you unlock Frosted’s interactive mode. You can enter your own name in the settings for the screensaver, and Frosted will actually call you out by name. You also gain the ability to click on things within the scene to see “special surprises,” and you can even throw snowballs at Frosted, Rudy, or Santa (to the point where you can make them pass out if you feel like such a Grinch).

Even if you’re in a place where you can only dream of a white Christmas (hint: San Francisco), the Frosted screensaver is a great screensaver to give you a bit of winter chill and holiday spirit.

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.

Tags: Deck the Desktops, Frosted, reindeer, review, Santa, screensaver, Skyrocket Software, snowballs, snowman

The first ten days of my Deck the Desktops series have covered my most-favorite apps for the basic decorations to choose from for your Mac desktop. However, there’s more than one way to decorate, and many different flavors of decoration apps to choose from as well. So today, my Deck the Desktops series will begin to shift focus by beginning to cover more apps that I don’t necessarily use, but have tried and still recommend nevertheless. And today, the spotlight falls on Xmas Lights.

Xmas Lights was my app of choice for putting Christmas/holiday lights on my desktop before I discovered MacLampsX, but it is still a good, simple, lightweight light-stringing app. Xmas Lights simply focuses on hanging a string of lights from your menubar. There are five lighting styles to choose from, and you can choose to hang them behind or above all windows. You can also choose to have them blink or not, and you set the time delay for blinking.

Xmas Lights is freeware, and a very decent alternative to MacLampsX to hang those Christmas lights down from your menubar. And the best part: no crazy hooks to deal with!

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.

Tags: Christmas, Deck the Desktops, decoration, holiday, lights, menubar, review