Holiday Light Bulbs

[Mal]

I'm sure some of you are familiar with the excellent (if a little underutilized) MacLampsX, which is a replacement option for the incredible Holiday Lights program from the days of Mac OS X. If you're not, it allows you to simply place animated lights and other items around the edge of your screen:

Link: MacLampsX from ArcticMac

Since the developer has many other things to do, I've undertaken to make a few additional bulbs, which can be found on the site linked above, but I'm wanting to make more. Unfortunately, my artistic skills are very limited, and so far I've not been able to create original artwork that actually looks good for this purpose.

So, I'd like to ask if anyone would be willing to work with me to create some more bulbs for this great program. It's all for free, I'm not planning to make any money, but we can all benefit from this work. I'll credit anyone who helps in the bulb files themselves. All I need is 32x32 pixel artwork for the bulbs, and I can provide the template of the string to match if needed. Multiple colors and on/off states are great for the artwork, as well as rotated versions (I can do that part if needed). I'll do the actual work of turning them into a usable bulb file for MacLampsX, since I've done this a number of times already.

Anyone that can help, please post here, and hopefully we can put some together in time for Christmas! Non-Christmas bulb ideas are also welcome, Holidays Lights used to have bulbs for nearly every season.

jW

 

[jsgreen]

does MacLamps X work for Lion? I installed it and can play with Preferences, but no lamps show up.

 

[Mal]

It's working for me, though I had it installed before I switched to Lion, so I don't know if that makes a difference (a preference file or something may not create properly in Lion, but will work if it's already there perhaps). You can try contacting the developer, though I haven't contacted him in a couple years now and he was really busy then.

jW

 

[Raid]

I remember this App! I thought it was pretty funny for the holidays and went well with another app that caused a snow fall on the screen. Are there example templates you can post for new lights? If there's nothing like a template available, what file format would you be looking for?

 

[Mal]

There aren't any templates available, necessarily, but I'll post one that I made (I didn't make the original artwork used here, but I got permission to use it for this). Bulb files are just folders with a .bulb extension added to make them a package that MacLampsX will recognize. Inside are three files that are needed to make it work (inside of a Contents folder, this is important):

bulb.plist
corners.png
sides.png

The png files are the bulbs themselves. Each bulb is 32x32 pixels, at 72dpi, and if you want to have multiple variations, you simply expand the image vertically to make the different sides, and horizontally to have different colors or versions. Additionally, if there is going to be an on/off state, you put those side by side (in 32x32 squares). Controls within the plist file tell MacLampsX whether those variations exist so it knows how to use them.

EDIT: In case you couldn't tell from the images above, the image should contain the four sides in the order of bottom, left, top, right, as you go from the top down. If you don't need each side to be different, you can simply do only one row. The corners work the same way, starting with the bottom right and going around clockwise.

jW

 

[Mal]

Just thought I'd add, right now I'm most interested in graphics for those pointy multi-faceted bulbs, and icicle lights (the scale would have to be smaller than most of the other bulbs to look right, probably, but that's ok). I also had at one point, but lost, a "bulb" file that put snow across the bottom of the display, but frost and/or snowflakes on the sides and top.

jW