12 days of holiday downloads, Day 12: Windows

It's a sad day here at Download Squad: the final day of our 12 days of holiday downloads. But it's not goodbye, it's "'til next year." And since it's never to soon to start planning conspicuous consumerism--or at least conspicuousness--as our parting shot I leave you Holidaysoft's Holiday Lights Designer 3.

HLD will take a series of pictures of a building and form a 3D model on which you can hang lights and decorations to plot out your holiday display. There are a number of preset lighting combinations including minibulbs and old-fashioned C9 and C37 bulbs, or you can add your own lighting configurations and decorations. When you're done decorating, you can view the model in different ambient lighting conditions and even through snow and fog. And when you have it just right you can use the scale tool to figure out exactly how many feet of which kinds of lights strings to put where. For the true Christmas addict, this is an ideal way to weather those long months of withdrawl until the lights go back up next Novemember.

The free five day trial is fun to play around with. If you think $49 is too much for the full version, though, you're probably right. It's not that the designers don't deserve it; there's actually been a lot of thought and effort put into the interface and functionality. It's a pretty slick little program. But we're talking about Christmas lights. If you design light displays for a living and need mock-ups to show clients, though, HLD might be money well spent.

Previous 12 Days of holiday downloads for Windows:
Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9, Day 10, Day 11

Tags: 12 days or holiday downloads, 12DaysOrHolidayDownloads, christmas, commercial, holiday lights designer, HolidayLightsDesigner, holidaysoft, windows