Running your first pet

Let us get a pet onto your screen. This takes about ten seconds.

Turn a pet on

1. Open the Library window (it appears on launch; if it is hidden, click the app’s menu-bar/tray icon → Show Library).
2. Make sure the Pets tab is selected at the top, and the source toggle is on Default so you see the pets that ship with the app.
3. Click a pet to select it. Its details appear in the panel on the right.
4. Flip the Live toggle on. The pet spawns on your desktop, down at the bottom of the screen, and starts doing its thing.

Selecting a pet in the Library and switching its Live toggle on.

A small green Live badge appears on the pet’s card so you can see at a glance which pets are currently running. Turn the toggle off to send the pet away.

You can run as many pets at once as you like. Toggle on a few and they will all share your desktop.

What your pet does on screen

Each pet is a small transparent, always-on-top window that shows only the sprite: no frame, no background. Out of the box, pets:

• Walk back and forth along the bottom of your usable screen, resting on top of the Dock/taskbar rather than hiding behind it.
• Bounce at the edges. When a pet reaches the side of the screen it turns around and heads back.
• Face the way they are going. The sprite mirrors left/right automatically.

Exactly how a pet behaves (how long it idles, when it walks, whether it picks random paths) comes from its behavior graph. The built-in pets each have their own; when you make your own pet, you design this yourself (Part 2).

Pick it up and drop it

Two behaviors are always on, for every pet:

• Drag. Click and hold any pet, then move your mouse to carry it anywhere on screen. Release to drop it.
• Fall. If you drop a pet in mid-air, it falls with gravity until it lands back on the bottom, then carries on with its behavior.

A pet mid-drag, about to fall after being released in mid-air.

There is nothing to configure for these: they work on every pet, including ones you create. In this demo they are always on; a future Early Access release turns drag and fall into node behaviors you wire up yourself, so you can decide when a pet is draggable or affected by gravity. (The one exception today: Focus Mode, covered next, makes pets click-through so your clicks pass straight to whatever is behind them, which also means you cannot drag them until you turn Focus Mode off.)

Resize a pet

Pets render at their sprite’s native size by default. To make one bigger or smaller, select it in the Library and use the Scale stepper in the detail panel (from 0.1× up to 20×). The change applies immediately to the live pet.

Send them away

• Toggle a pet’s Live switch off to remove just that pet.
• Use Hide All Pets (in the tray menu) to hide everything at once without losing your setup. See the next page.
• Quit from the tray menu closes the app entirely.