DesktopDogs

DesktopDogs puts a small 3D dog and its house on your wallpaper. It walks out of the door, wanders the yard, sniffs at things, barks at something you cannot see, then goes back inside and falls asleep. It sits behind every window you have open, on every desktop, and never asks for your attention.

It also grows up. The puppy you adopt today is one percent bigger tomorrow and fully grown a hundred days from now, stepping up a visible size every ten days. After that the counter keeps going: your dog has an age, and you keep it for as long as you like. Everything runs on your own computer - nothing about your dog is uploaded, and it keeps growing whether you are online or not.

Highlights

1. A puppy that becomes a dog - eleven visible stages between a big-headed, short-legged pup and a full-grown adult. Not the same model scaled up: the head, the legs, the muzzle and the belly all change shape as it grows.
2. Its own house, and it uses it - the dog walks out through the door and walks back in to sleep. Look through the doorway and you can see it in there.
3. Pick the pair yourself - a Shiba in four coats, and two houses in three colours each: a classic red kennel or a low modern loft. You choose the pairing when you adopt, and from then on that is your dog, in its house, growing up.
4. Look after it - feed it, throw a ball, give it a fuss, call it over, send it to bed. It gets hungry, bored and sleepy in real time, and takes itself home when it has had enough.
5. A mind of its own - it wanders, sits, lies down, digs, scratches, stretches, shakes itself off, gets the zoomies and tilts its head at your cursor. It barks out loud only if you ask it to.
6. Click the dog - click it to pet it, click the bowl to feed it, click the house to call it out or send it in. Drag to look around the yard, scroll to make it bigger.
7. Stays out of the way - the yard is 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.
8. As many as you like - adopt a second dog and it gets its own house, its own corner of the screen and its own birthday. Each yard is sized and placed on its own.

How it works

1. Adopt a puppy: pick a dog, pick a house, pick their colours, and watch the two of them together before you name it.
2. The kennel window shows every dog you have: how far through growing up it is, when the next growth spurt lands, how hungry, rested and happy it is, and when you last looked after it.
3. A strip of eleven pictures shows the whole arc - where your dog is today, and exactly what it is going to become.
4. Close the kennel window and the app keeps running quietly in the background. Your dogs stay on the wallpaper.

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 cannot keep a real dog - a flat, a lease, an allergy, a schedule. This one needs feeding and gets nothing worse than bored.
3. Anyone who likes a thing that rewards coming back tomorrow - a hundred days is a long time to watch something grow, and it grows whether you are watching or not.