Pixels

Desktop pets for macOS that remind you to drink water and take walks.

• Cat: water reminder (default every 45 min, goal 8 glasses a day). Walks along the bottom of the screen.
• Gengar: walk reminder (default every 60 min). Floats around.
• When a reminder is due, that pet comes to your mouse pointer, hops and shows a bubble. Click it to log the glass or walk.
• Friends: every GIF/PNG in friends/ becomes a companion. -fly in the filename makes it float, -walk makes it walk (for real walk-cycle GIFs), -big makes it a size up. Others stay where you put them.
• Ignored reminders escalate: after 5 min the pet grows and shakes; after 10 min the screen dims with a big pet and Done / 5 more min buttons (skipped while your camera or mic is in use or an app is fullscreen).
• Each pet has its own personality and signature moves (Gengar vanishes and sneaks up on your cursor, Vaporeon melts, Lapras sings, Mew transforms into the others). Pets keep a gap from each other.
• Shake the mouse: everyone jumps and scatters. ⌃⌥J: everyone jumps.
• Right-click a pet: "Move around" on/off, "Hide (peek from the bottom)", intervals, snooze, sound, and "Show both reminders now".
• Timers pause while the screen is off or locked.

The app reads friends from ~/Pixels/friends. If you cloned somewhere other than ~/Pixels, copy them over: mkdir -p ~/Pixels && cp -R friends ~/Pixels/.

Build and run

./build.sh
open Pixels.app                 # or: open Pixels.app --args --demo  (reminders in a few seconds)

Install: cp -R Pixels.app ~/Applications/, then add it to Login Items to start at login.

Assets

The sprites in assets/ and friends/ are not mine: Pokémon sprites are © Nintendo / Game Freak, the cat GIF belongs to its creator. They're included as examples for a non-commercial fan project. Swap in any GIFs you like.