Desktop pets
A desktop pet is a little animated creature that sits on top of everything else you have open — wandering across your windows, sitting down, washing, falling asleep — and asks nothing of you. This page is about where they came from, what the free ones actually do, and how to get one that looks like your own cat or dog rather than someone else's.
Technically it is a transparent, always-on-top window with no frame, an animation loop inside it, and enough restraint not to steal your clicks. That is the whole trick. What makes them worth having is not the engineering but the effect: something alive in the corner of a screen that is otherwise full of work.
They are not assistants. A desktop pet does not want anything, does not summarise your email and has no opinion about your calendar. It is closer to an office plant than to Clippy — and Clippy, for what it is worth, is the ancestor everybody in this category is quietly trying not to be.
The idea is older than most people expect. Neko, a small cat that chased your cursor around the screen and fell asleep when it caught up, dates to the late 1980s and was ported to just about every system that has existed since. Shimeji, from Japan, put mascots on the desktop that could climb your window edges and hang off them; a Java reimplementation kept it alive long after the original, and its whole culture is people swapping image sets so their desktop mascot is a particular character. Desktop Goose took the opposite approach and made the animal a nuisance on purpose, dragging things across your screen while you tried to work. Bongo Cat started as a meme and became a desktop overlay that drums along with your keyboard.
Between them they cover most of what the category does: a pet that ignores you, a pet that annoys you, and a pet that reacts to you. What almost none of them do is look like your animal.
In nearly every desktop pet, the animal is a fixed set of drawings that somebody else made. You choose from a list. If you want a specific cat — a grey one with white socks and one folded ear — your options are to find a skin close enough, or to learn the sprite format and draw sixty frames yourself.
That is a reasonable trade for a mascot. It is a bad trade if the animal you have in mind is a real one.
Shimeji-style apps and most free desktop pets. Fast to install, and the animal is whichever ones the artists drew. Making a new one means making art.
Gets you a picture, not a pet — a still image with no rig, no poses and no way to walk across a screen. And your photos go to somebody's server to get it.
You add a few photographs of your own cat or dog. Vision models running inside your own browser find the animal, cut it out, and measure about thirty things about them: coat colours, where the white is, stripes or patches, the shape of the ears and tail, eye colour. Those numbers drive a hand-built drawing rig that already knows how to sit, walk, wash and nap. You get a pet that moves properly and looks like yours.
Nothing is generated from a prompt, and no photograph is uploaded anywhere. There is no server in this product at all — the measuring happens in your own browser tab, and the pictures are gone when you close it.
The pet that comes out is a file of about thirty numbers on your own disk. No account holds it and no service can take it away.
Two routes, and either is about a minute:
On a Mac the app lives in the menu bar; on Windows, the system tray. Your pet floats above your other windows, wanders when it feels like it, and settles down when it does not. Right-click them to ask them over, to stretch, to wash or to nap.
Worth saying plainly, because the category has form here. It does not sit in front of your work, it does not drag your files around, it does not talk to you unless you ask, and it has no notifications. The animals move; the page, and your screen, hold still.
Yes — no paid tier, no trial, no advertising, and the source is public under the MIT licence. See the questions page for the rest.
Yes. Dogs have their own drawing rig rather than being a stretched cat, which is why they took longer and why they look like dogs.