Welcome to Indie App Spotlight. This is a weekly 9to5Mac series where we showcase the latest apps in the indie app world. If you’re a developer and would like your app featured, get in contact.
Pumpkin Lights is a nifty little menu bar app for Mac that lets you quickly toggle between light mode and dark mode with a ray-traced jack-o-lantern that drops down from the top of your screen. It’s completely free, and very fun to utilize.
If you remember the Festivas menu bar app from Mac year, Pumpkin Lights is very similar in concept.
Pumpkin Lights brings a jack-o-lantern to your menu bar, just in time for halloween. It’s a nice decoration, and there’s plenty of different ways to customize it. You can “grow” many different pumpkin designs, as well as pick between four different color variants.
When you click on the pumpkin or pull on it, your Mac will toggle between light and dark mode – at least by default. Pumpkin Lights also has the option to open an app/website, keep your Mac awake, mute a sound, run a command, or run a shortcut of your choice.
The jack-o-lantern does have proper physics, so you can actually toss it around a bit and move it around in a novel way. You can customize the rope it hangs from, and much more. There’s also an option to have a hanging light bulb that serves a similar purpose.
Why Pumpkin Lights? Here’s what the developer has to say:
The idea came from something most of us do every day without thinking: switching between Light and Dark Mode. It’s always a toggle buried in Control Center or System Settings, and it never feels like anything. I wanted it to feel like touching a real object. So instead of a flat icon, the pumpkin and the bulb are real 3D models, ray-traced in real time, hanging on cords you can swing and spin. When the candle lights, its glow comes through the carved face. I spent most of my time on small details like how the cords move and how light falls on the pumpkin, because I wanted it to still feel delightful the hundredth time you use it, not just the first.
Pumpkin Lights is a completely free utility. You can download it from the developer’s website here, and it’s available for any Mac running macOS 14 Sonoma or later. You can also follow the developer on Twitter.
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Michael is a 9to5Mac Reporter, leading all of our Apple news coverage on weekends and reviewing the newest Apple products and accessories. He got started in the world of Apple news during the pandemic, and it became a growing hobby. He’s also an indie iOS developer, and started the weekly Indie App Spotlight series, which has covered hundreds of blooming new apps since it launched. In his free time, he enjoys shooting street photography around New York City on his Sony A7RV.
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