Desktop Pet: Virtual Companions

Desktop Pet drops a handful of hand-drawn pixel-art companions into the pages you already visit. They walk, climb, fly and hop around the page while you read, and they get on with their own day whether or not you are paying attention. Nothing to feed, no timers, no chores. Just something alive in the corner of your screen. It is free, with no ads and nothing to unlock. It is part of the Invenio Vero Extension family, a collection of small, lightweight browser extensions built to make everyday browsing a little better without getting in the way. MEET THE PETS Each one behaves differently, because each one has its own temperament rather than a shared script. • Cat: calm and curious. It has the run of the whole window, walking the floor, climbing the walls and strolling upside down along the ceiling. It looks over when your cursor drifts past, sometimes follows it for a few steps, and bolts if you come right up to its face. It grooms itself when it thinks nobody is watching. • Dog: friendly and playful. The busiest of them on its feet. It notices your cursor from most of the way across the window and usually trots straight over to sit and stare at you. It barks. It bounces on the spot when it gets excited. • Blue Jay: active and curious. It spends most of its time in the air, beating up to a cruising height and gliding back down to hop about for a while. You get the crest, the black necklace and the barred tail. It preens between perches, stretches its wings, and is gone the moment you get too close. • Robin: bold and territorial. This is the one that comes to you. It spends more of its day on the floor than in the air, hopping about and pecking at things, and when your cursor comes near it will often set off after it, because as far as a robin is concerned anything moving through its patch is either food or a rival. Once it has set off it does not lose interest either: it stays on your pointer until it catches up, gives it a peck, and only then goes off about its business. Try to outrun it and it simply comes faster, since the longer the chase goes on the more determined it gets. It does the same on the wing, breaking out of a glide to come after you across the page. Move the mouse off the page entirely and it gives up, since there is nothing left to catch. It is the only pet here that never runs away from you. • Frog: lazy and unpredictable. It mostly sits perfectly still, with the occasional hop or short walk breaking things up. It barely notices you until you are right on top of it, and then it bolts away in hops. It snaps at passing flies. • Rabbit: skittish and watchful. The opposite of the frog, nearly always on the move, bounding across the page in long flat hops and stopping to freeze and listen. It sees you coming from a long way off, and its first instinct is to stare rather than ignore you. It thumps a hind foot. It never comes to you, and if you get close it is gone. • Kangaroo: tough and protective. It gets about in big, powerful bounds, and in between it stands tall on its tail or goes down on all fours to graze. It is the one pet that stands its ground. Bring your cursor too close and it takes that as a threat: up go the red boxing gloves, and it squares up and throws punches at your pointer, turning to keep you in front of it, and now and then it even hops over to have a go at a cursor that is hanging about nearby. Every so often a little joey pokes its head out of the pouch to have a look around, and now and then it climbs right out, hops about next to its mother for a bit and jumps back in. Bring your cursor near while it is out and it dashes straight back to the pouch. Pet the kangaroo and the joey comes out to see you too. • Ghost: shy and spooky. The one pet that is not an animal, and the only one you can see through. It drifts about in the air, hangs upside down from the top of the page by the hem of its sheet, and floats up and down the walls. When it reaches the side of the window it often just keeps going, fading out through one edge and drifting back in through the other. Bring your cursor near and it fades until it is barely there, then stares back at you or slips away into the air. Catch it right under your cursor, though, and it turns solid again, and if you pet it, it blushes. Every so often it throws its arms up and shouts BOO. THEY KNOW YOU ARE THERE Point at a pet and it will turn its head to look at you. Come closer and what happens next depends on who it is. One will wander over, another will freeze, another will bolt, one will come after your cursor until it catches it, one will put its gloves up and box it, and one will fade away until you can hardly see it. Leave the mouse alone for long enough and they curl up and fall asleep right there on the page, then wake up when you move it again. They will not react to every twitch of the cursor, and that is on purpose. A pet that answers every movement stops reading as an animal and starts reading as a toy. PET THEM, PICK THEM UP, PUT THEM DOWN Click a pet to pet it. Drag one to pick it up and carry it anywhere on the page, then let go. Where you drop it matters. Hold a cat against a wall or up at the ceiling and it catches hold and carries on climbing. Give the jay some height and it simply flies off. Anything else drops to the floor and shakes it off. THEY FOLLOW YOU BETWEEN TABS Your pets are not stuck to one page. Switch tabs and they come with you, picked up mid-stride rather than starting over, so you have one small group of animals following you around the web instead of a fresh herd in every tab. A UFO SOMETIMES SHOWS UP Every so often a UFO drops in out of nowhere and drifts back and forth up near the top of the page for a while before disappearing again the same way it arrived. Most of the time that is all it does. Every so often, though, it spots a pet, walking or flying, and pulls it straight up into the ship on a beam of light before flying off. A little while later it comes ba…