macOS

A desktop pet for your Mac

Free, universal for Apple silicon and Intel, and drawn from photographs of your own cat or dog rather than picked off a list of somebody else's characters. It lives in the menu bar and your pet lives on the desktop.

Download for macOS Or make one in your browser first

What you need

• macOS 12 Monterey or later. One universal build covers Apple silicon and Intel — there is nothing to choose between.
• A few photographs of your pet, or one ten-second video of them.
• About 20 MB of download the first time you build a pet, for the vision models. After that it works offline.

Installing it

1. Download the .dmg and open it.

2. Drag Still Around into your Applications folder.

3. Open it. macOS will stop you the first time — see the next section, it takes ten seconds.

4. Add your photos, check the likeness, and your pet walks onto the desktop.

"Apple could not verify this app" — what to do

You will see a warning the first time, because the build is not yet code-signed. An Apple Developer certificate costs money this project does not take in. That is the honest reason, and it is worth saying rather than leaving you to guess.

• First try: right-click (or Control-click) the app in Applications and choose Open, then Open again in the dialog.
• On recent macOS that no longer works. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down to the Security section, and next to the message about Still Around click Open Anyway.
• If you would rather not do either, the whole source is public and you can build it yourself.

You only have to do this once. If that trade does not sit right with you, that is a completely reasonable place to stop — and you can still make a pet in your browser, where nothing gets installed at all.

Where it lives once it is running

In the menu bar, as a small paw. There is no window to keep track of. Click the paw to add another pet, open Settings, resize them, hide them for a while, or quit. Your pet floats above your other windows, including full-screen apps, and settles down when they have had enough of walking. Right-click the animal itself to ask them over, to stretch, to wash, or to nap.

What it does to your Mac

Very little, on purpose. It is a small drawing on a canvas and it idles: full frame rate while your pet is moving or talking, a trickle once they have settled, and you can set both rates yourself in Settings. The expensive part is building the pet, and that happens once.