This holiday season, my wife and I are trying something new. Instead of going out and looking for commercial software to give me for Christmas, we're going to register all of my favorite shareware programs. I find this very appealing. It saves on shopping, it supports shareware authors at a time of year when everyone could use a little extra spending money, and it creates (as my wife puts it) "good shareware karma."
So if you've downloaded something in the past year and you use it all the time, consider sending in that registration fee. You'll be glad you did.
 
Deck Your Desktop
 
Holiday Lights
Holiday Lights by Tiger Technologies 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 strung them there.
The lights flash in the background while you work. The "bulbs" include standard Christmas tree lights, Valentine's Day hearts, Thanksgiving turkeys, chili peppers, stockings, holly, snowmen, happy faces, and more. You can create your own bulbs using ResEdit or a similar program. Best of all, Holiday Lights is an application, not a control panel, so you'll have fewer potential conflicts.
For even more seasonal joy, Holiday Lights includes optional cheery background music and a built-in festive screen saver to put you in the holiday spirit.
Holiday Lights (v. 3.0.4, Jan 97, 857 K) is $15 shareware, and it's available from the Tiger Technologies website at http://www.tigertech.com/.
 
Fa-la-la-la-la
 
Select XMas Icons
Included in this set is a unique string of folders that, when strung
together on your desktop, becomes Santa's sleigh complete with elf,
Christmas gifts and 12 tiny reindeer! When selected, the words
"MERRY CHRISTMAS" magically appear!
This:
 
becomes this:
 
Now tell me that isn't cute.
The set also includes the Magic Xmas Cursor, a system extension that turns your normal arrow cursor into a festive Xmas tree light bulb.
Select Xmas Icons (v. 1.0, Oct 97, 156K) by Jason Rainbow is $10 shareware. The URL is: http://www.q-net.net/~rainbow/.
 
And In My Stocking This Year...
 
breakIn
Do you remember Breakout, the classic arcade game by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak? Built on the foundations of Pong, Breakout remains one of my all-time favorite games.
breakIn (v. 1.02, Oct 97, 1683K) is Rene Bauer's beautiful re-interpretation of the original. The gameplay is still simple and addictive. As in Pong, you move your paddle back and forth to keep the ball in play. The object is to hit all the bricks on the screen to make them disappear. The stunning, lovingly rendered 3D graphics in this version benefit from a darker color scheme than you'd ordinarily find in a game of this sort. The artwork alone would justify the $20 shareware fee.
Bounce on over to http://www.antronic.ch/rebauer/ and break out the fun!
 
Errata
Last month I gave the address for John Norstad's Disinfectant. The address has changed since then. The new URL is http://charlotte.at.nwu.edu/jln/progs.ssi. Sorry for any confusion, and thanks to Frank V. Fejtek for pointing this out.
