v0.9.0

A pixel-art desktop companion that lives on your screen.

What is new in 0.9.0

Added

• Sea world: an Atlantic underwater scene with day/night and seasonal water state, a shark that flees from the mouse pointer, and a calendar date picker for previewing the year
• New meadow creatures: snake, rat, bat, chicken, and a garden robin. Deer stays on by default; the rest are opt-in
• Creature-variant framework: animals can ship as interchangeable variants (e.g. Bird → robin) with an expandable control-panel UI and per-variant selection
• Principled creature scaling so on-screen sizes are biologically proportional rather than hand-picked, with creatures grouped by zoological class in the control panel

Changed

• Ambient is now multi-world (Meadow + Sea) with day-driven state shared across worlds

v0.8.0

A pixel-art desktop companion that lives on your screen.

What is new in 0.8.0

Added

• Living spring calendar: each day of spring looks distinct. A per-year flower roster gives every flower a stable position with its own first-bloom and petal-fall day, so blooms persist day-to-day and only a few open or fall each morning
• Daily weather (clear/overcast/rainy/windy) driven by a Markov chain that clusters into 2–4 day stretches, plus a one-shot firstWarmDay signaling spring emergence
• Rain drop and petal drift particle layers tied to the weather state

Changed

• Weather now modulates seasonal effects with realistic insect biology: bees and butterflies effectively disappear in rain (~0.02× activity), wind drops butterflies more than bees, overcast suppresses butterfly basking, and firstWarmDay produces a signature emergence boost

v0.7.0

A pixel-art desktop companion that lives on your screen.

What is new in 0.7.0

Added

• Butterflies, bees, and dawn songbirds — new ambient creatures that appear seasonally and at the right time of day
• Gradual patchy snow accumulation — snow now arrives as scattered patches that build into a solid blanket, scaling with seasonal intensity instead of switching on abruptly
• Realistic fireflies — fireflies now emerge at dusk (cos² curve centered 15 min after sunset, gone by 90 min past) with a tighter summer peak; the hard night-only gate is removed
• Independent seasonal effects — growth, snow, dryness, puddles, and fireflies are each a separate SeasonalEffect with its own bell curve, threshold, and runtime override

Changed

• Grass is suppressed under snow and lerps to straw yellow during summer dryness
• Flowers are gated by a growth threshold; fireflies scale with seasonal intensity
• Firefly seasonal peak shifted to early July with a narrower window (tapered by mid-April and early September)

v0.6.0

A pixel-art desktop companion that lives on your screen.

What is new in 0.6.0

Added

• Sunrise/sunset computed from timezone-inferred latitude via the NOAA solar equation — dawn/day/dusk/night bands now track the real sun
• Smooth tint interpolation across twilight replaces the previous hardcoded 4-hour jumps
• Continuous seasonal tint blends between adjacent-season anchors so the palette shifts gradually each day instead of snapping on month boundaries; hemisphere auto-detected from timezone
• Meadow growth curve drives flower density, color palette (white/yellow/pink/red/purple), and grass height
• Seasonal ground features baked into the terrain bitmap: bare-dirt dry patches (peak August), winter snow dusting (peak late January), spring puddles (peak early April) — each fades in/out via a narrow cos² bell curve

Changed

• Default control panel window size bumped to 900×820
• "Update available" block in sidebar: stacked text + full-width button with explicit hover/active states
• Verified-build tooltip repositioned to the right of the sidebar with an opaque background and hover bridge
• WKWebView preloaded 0.5s after app launch and kept alive across toggles, eliminating the ~300ms boot delay and reload flash on subsequent opens

v0.5.0

A pixel-art desktop companion that lives on your screen.

What is new in 0.5.0

Added

• Ambient grass sways in a light breeze with occasional stronger gusts
• Fireflies appear above the grass at night — realistic burst-based flashes that scatter across the strip
• Pause toggle directly in the Pets tab header

Changed

• Sidebar reorganized: Controls moved from the Pet section to General (next to Credits); Pet section order is now Pets → Actions → Context → Reminders
• Control panel opens on the Pets tab by default

Fixed

• Sidebar selection no longer highlights the wrong row when tab indices don't match DOM order

Changelog

v0.4.1

A pixel-art desktop companion that lives on your screen.

What is new in 0.4.1

Fixed

• Ambient strip (grass and deer) no longer renders over the Dock on screens with the Dock enabled

v0.4.0

A pixel-art desktop companion that lives on your screen.

What is new in 0.4.0

Added

• Ambient world: a persistent layer at the bottom of the screen that runs independently from the pet
• Deer (Calciumtrice sprites, recolored with a custom warm palette) that wander, graze, sleep at night, and flee from the mouse
• Day/night cycle with time-of-day tinting baked into the ground palette; spawn rate, population cap, and behaviors shift across dawn/day/dusk/night
• Per-instance personality on spawned creatures (speed, graze bias, flight radius, flee cooldown)
• Hand-drawn pixel terrain: layered dirt, soil edge, grass blades, pebbles, occasional flowers
• Credits tab (replaces the old footer modal), with external links opening via NSWorkspace
• Events section in the control panel, separate from Quick Actions, with action category sections

Changed

• Control panel reorganized into Pet / Ambient / General sidebar groups
• Creatures can be enabled/disabled per ID; disabling culls live instances, re-enabling triggers a fresh spawn within ~1s
• Actions page UX polish

v0.3.0

What's new in v0.3.0

Actions panel overhaul

• Actions are now grouped into categories: Movement, Reactions, Social, Quirky, and pet-exclusive sections
• Events (actions that occupy screen space) are now separated into their own section with a clear label
• Active event banner with a Stop button appears at the top when an event is running
• Action descriptions no longer truncate — they wrap so you can read the full text
• Lone actions at the end of a section span the full width instead of leaving an awkward gap
• Clicking an action now flashes briefly to confirm it fired

v0.2.0

What's new in 0.2.0

• Drowsy eyelids animation during sleep
• Mini-game polish: Tokyo city, football urgency, team colors
• Fixed alignment for tears and cover-eyes sprites
• Fixed scoreboard team color dot
• Removed unintended squish on mini-action and sleep transitions

v0.1.0

A pixel-art desktop companion that lives on your screen.

What it does

• Wanders around and sits on window title bars
• Reacts to what you're doing (coding, browsing, idle)
• Plays with toys, runs mini-actions (football match, workout, city growth, and more)
• Grab and throw it with your mouse
• Chats with you via on-device LLM (macOS 26+)
• Friends from other machines on your LAN drop by

Auto-update

Future releases install automatically, verified by SHA256 + Ed25519 signature before updating.

Install

bash <(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/acabelloj/desktop-pet-releases/main/install.sh)