DesktopCactus

DesktopCactus puts a real, growing cactus on your wallpaper. It sits in its pot behind every window you have open, on every desktop, swaying very slightly, and it never asks for your attention. It is not a game and there is nothing to beat - it is a plant you keep.

It takes a hundred days to grow up, and it steps up a visible size every ten of them. On day 50 a flower bud appears on its crown, and from then on the bloom opens a little further with every step until it is wide open on day 100. Everything runs on your own computer - nothing about your cactus is uploaded, and it keeps growing whether you are online or not.

Highlights

1. A flower on day 50 - the bud arrives on the fiftieth morning, tightly shut, and opens across the remaining fifty days into a wide, many-petalled bloom. It is the thing you are keeping the plant for, and the app counts down to it from the day you plant.
2. A seedling that becomes a cactus - eleven visible stages between a squat little nub and a full grown plant. Not the same model scaled up: it changes shape as it grows, narrowing, ribbing up, arming itself with spines and throwing out new arms and pads on the way.
3. Growth you can actually see - a daily one percent is three pixels and nobody would ever notice it, so growth arrives in ten real steps. The bar tells you the day, the percentage, and exactly how long until the next one.
4. Pick the pair yourself - a golden barrel, a fluted column or a prickly pear, each in three skins; a terracotta pot, a carved stone cup or a glazed ceramic bowl, each in three colours. Any cactus grows in any pot. You choose when you plant, and from then on that is your cactus, in its pot, growing up.
5. See the future before you commit - the planting screen is a live 3D scene with a hundred-day scrubber. Drag it to day 50 and watch the bud open on the exact plant you are about to keep.
6. One need, and it is a slow one - a cactus wants water about every twelve days, and that is the only thing it asks of you. Let it get thirsty and it dulls and slumps a little; water it and it drinks, swells and greens up again. It never stops growing, so a fortnight away costs you nothing.
7. Touch it - click the cactus to nudge it and watch it wobble, click the pot to water it, drag to turn the whole plant round and look at the other side, scroll to make it bigger.
8. Stays out of the way - the plant lives in a frameless, see-through window that sits under your app windows, follows you to every desktop, and never steals focus or takes a slot in the app switcher. Switch it to click-through and the cursor passes straight to whatever is underneath.
9. As many as you like - plant a second and it gets its own pot, its own corner of the screen and its own hundred days. Each one is sized and placed on its own.

How it works

1. Plant a cactus: pick a species, pick a pot, pick their colours, scrub the preview forward to see what it becomes, then name it. What arrives is always a day-zero seedling.
2. The greenhouse window shows every cactus you have: what day it is on, how far through growing, when the next growth step lands, how many days until the flower, and when you last watered it.
3. A strip of eleven pictures shows the whole arc - where your cactus is today, and exactly what it is going to become. Day 50 is marked on it, so you can see the bloom coming.
4. Close the greenhouse window and the app keeps running quietly in the menu bar. Your cacti stay on the wallpaper and keep growing.

Perfect for

1. Anyone who wants something alive on a screen full of work - it is there when you glance over, and gone from your mind when you are typing.
2. People who kill real plants - no light, no drainage, no repotting, and no way to overwater it. The worst that happens is it looks a bit sorry for itself until you remember.
3. Anyone who likes a thing that rewards coming back tomorrow - a hundred days is a long time to watch something grow, there is a flower waiting at the halfway mark, and it grows whether you are watching or not.