The changes are listed with the most recent version shown first.

 
Version 5.2

This is a minor update that adds an "Old Glory" US Flag bulb.

 
Version 5.1

The settings for the bulbs, music and screen saver are now all in one window, which is accessed by choosing "Settings" from the "Edit" menu.

Support for themes. Arrange your bulbs, music and screen saver settings the way you like them, then click "Save Theme" in the theme area of the Settings window. Your settings are saved as a theme for later use.

Better randomization of music: songs won't repeat until you've heard each of them.

The music now supports MP3 and AIFF files as well as MIDI songs. It supports aliases; you can put an alias to your folder of MP3 songs into the Holiday Lights Music folder and it will work. (Requires QuickTime 4.)

Added a "None" screen saver animation option.

Changes to the preferences will be correctly saved even if your computer does not get shut down properly.

Worked around a limitation in the Mac OS that could cause your bulbs to disappear if they were drawing on top of all windows and the outline of the bulbs was very complex. (The window region was greater than 64K, which caused the Mac not to draw it at all — fixed by using four separate windows, each of which can be up to 64K.)

Fixed a number of minor inconsistencies to do with what happens when you turn off or on a song when it's currently being randomly played.

Other minor bug fixes.

 
Version 5.0

You can now display the bulbs on top of all other windows to make sure they're always visible.

Background pictures have been added to the screen saver (we've included some sample pictures to get you started; check the Holiday Lights page for more).

A floating text message has been added to the screen saver.

When snow falls in the screen saver, it builds up on the bulbs and on the ground a little bit, just as real snow would.

We've added seven new screen saver-only animations (grouped just under the snow in the screen saver animation menu).

You can now use any add-on bulb as a screen saver animation — and since our Web site has hundreds of free add-ons, this means hundreds of free screen saver animations!

The conversion of music files from general MIDI to QuickTime MIDI has been improved, working around a bug in the way Netscape Navigator downloads MIDI files that could cause it to fail.

Better compatibility with Kaleidoscope and Appearance themes.

Improved the sound of the MIDI songs and added two new songs.

Fixed a bug that could cause a crash if the monitor resolution was changed while the Bulb Factory window was open.

 
Version 4

There was no version 4 of Holiday Lights for Macintosh. This number was skipped in a (probably futile) attempt to keep the version numbers and features of the Macintosh and Windows versions in sync. (Version 5 has pretty much the same features on both platforms.)

 
Versions 3.1.1 and 3.1.2

Bulbs can now flash in different patterns.

If you place general MIDI files into the Music Files folder, Holiday Lights automatically converts them to QuickTime MIDI format – you no longer need to use MoviePlayer to convert them.

A Train Set bulb has been added, and all bulbs that were previously available separately have been incorporated into the main program rather than being installed as separate files. (If you install Holiday Lights 3.1 into a Holiday Lights 3.0 folder, the installer moves old Tiger Technologies bulb files to the trash can, but leaves other bulb files alone.)

Holiday Lights now loads in the background so you can keep using the computer while it's starting up. Newly added music files are turned on by default.

The bulbs are still visible around the edge of the screen when you use the Bulb Factory, and changes are shown immediately.

The basic bulbs are now built into the program, so moving Holiday Lights to another computer without copying the Bulb Files folder will work.

If you put a folder instead of a file into the Bulb Files or Music Files folder, Holiday Lights will look inside that folder for bulb or music files (it's recursive).

The order form is much easier to use.

The program no longer requires the Macintosh Drag and Drop system extension.

A bug was fixed that prevented the screen saver from being turned off in previous versions.

Holiday Lights now includes built–in version checking.

 
Version 3.0.2

By popular demand, music is now played in a random order!

Added Valentine's Day Bulbs.

The rectangles in the corners for detecting when to dim the screen are now 5 pixels square (was 3).

If you don't have Macintosh Drag and Drop installed, Holiday Lights now displays a message telling you to restart the computer.

Added a workaround to prevent a rare bug (reported by only two people) where the screen saver background was white.

Fixed a bug that prevented the corner icons from flashing in the correct frame order.

Fixed a bug that caused the "dim now" arrows in the screen saver box to point the wrong way on black and white screens.

Fixed a bug that prevented some songs from being usable if files other than QuickTime movies were in the Music Files folder.

Added new types of screen savers.

Revised some warning messages; the last word was not visible in some of them.

 
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.