Little pixel pets that live on your desktop.

A desktop pet app for Mac, Windows and Linux. Little pixel pets walk along your screen, nap, wave, and keep you company while you work. There's a small idle RPG starring them, and a few helpers for your day: focus, timers, reminders, water, a habit tracker, and how far through the day and the year you are. It's free for 7 days, then $9.99, once.

Taha Bozdemir, at Bold Biscuit. The Mac app is notarized by Apple, and every version, with what changed in it, is on What's new. Questions and bug reports go to hello@boldbiscuit.com.

Yes: a week, with everything in it. It starts the first time Desktamer opens on a computer, and it needs no card and no email. When the week is over your pets fall asleep, and all you made is kept for when you buy it: a license is $9.99, paid once, and they pick up where they left off.

Yes. If Desktamer isn't for you, email hello@boldbiscuit.com within 14 days of buying and you'll get a full refund.

Yes, on up to three at a time, in any mix of Mac, Windows and Linux. To move it to a fourth, open About on one of them, choose Deactivate This Computer, and activate on the new one. If the old computer is gone, email hello@boldbiscuit.com and we'll free it up.

On a Mac with macOS 13 or later, Apple silicon or Intel. On Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. On Linux, a 64-bit Intel or AMD computer with X11, or Wayland through XWayland. It doesn't run on phones or tablets.

The free week starts offline. In the background, Desktamer asks our server to remember its start; it retries while offline. Activating your license needs the internet too, and after that it works offline for good. When you're online, it checks the license once a day and looks for updates every few hours, and the gallery goes online when you open it. Everything it sends is on the privacy page.

Any Codex pet: a .codex-pet.zip, a pet folder, or its spritesheet. Animated GIFs and WebPs work too. Pets already in ~/.codex/pets show up by themselves, and the built-in gallery has plenty more. Or make your own.

It's the same idea: little creatures living on your desktop. Desktamer's pets don't climb your windows the way Shimeji do, but you can bring any Codex pet, look after them, and send them on quests in a small idle RPG. Both are in our lists of the best desktop pets for Mac and for Windows.

There's no menu bar to walk in, so pets walk along the bottom of the screen: on Windows, on top of the taskbar. The glance at your day that a MacBook's notch shows opens from the tray paw on Windows. Quiet during calls works on macOS and Windows; on Linux, use Do Not Disturb.

Then there's no island, and everything else is the same. The paw in the menu bar still starts focus, timers and water in a click, and a pet told to live in the notch walks the menu bar instead.

Clicks go through the see-through parts of a pet. You can tell a pet to stay put, send it home, or hide them all from the tray or with a shortcut. They keep calm during calls and focus rounds.

Not that you'd notice. On our Macs, three pets standing still use under 1% of one processor core, and three walking all the time about 13%. On a Mac or Windows PC, pets rest while the screen is off or locked, and Quest costs next to nothing once its window is covered or closed. What we measured, and how to check.

In a folder on your computer: your pets, their care, Quest, habits, notes and stats. Every launch keeps a backup copy of each file.