Desktop pets that are people, not animals
Search for a desktop pet and you get animals: a cat on the taskbar, a goose dragging your windows about, a drumming paw, a little blob. They are good fun, and a few of them are classics. Our characters are people — Max and Avery, and the crew behind them — and that is not just a change of costume. A human character can do things on a desktop an animal cannot.
What a human character can do that a cat cannot
Hands, mostly. A rigged human has arms with joints down to the fingers, so a buddy can hold a mug, plug in a cable, type at a small desk, water a plant, stick a note on a board or sort priority cards. An animal sprite waves a paw. Nearly every activity our buddies have exists because somebody has hands.
A face that means something
People read human faces automatically, which cuts both ways: it means a face has to be right, and it means a small change reads clearly. Our buddies share eight moods, and the same activity looks different depending which one they are in. You can pick a mood from a buddy’s right-click menu, or leave them to it.
They work rather than perform
The difference shows most when you are busy. An animal pet is usually an interruption by design — the joke is that it gets in the way. A person at the next desk is company instead: while you type, your buddy does desk work of their own, and when you step away they stretch, make coffee or read something.
Two people, and they are not the same person
Max is curious and a little restless: he runs, fidgets, gets distracted and comes back. Avery keeps a quieter rhythm, sorts things, reads, thinks before she moves. Having one of each out is different company from two of either, which is the part a shelf of identical pixel cats cannot give you.
Stylized, not a copy of a real face
They are cartoon people on purpose. A stylized character stays readable at the size of a Dock icon and does not fall into the uncanny valley the way a rendered realistic face does at 60 pixels tall. It is also the rule we apply to made-to-order buddies: a stylized buddy of someone who agreed to it, never an exact likeness of a face.
Where the animals still win
If what you want is a laugh, an animal wins and we would not pretend otherwise — Desktop Goose is funnier than we are, and BongoCat is free and excellent at the one thing it does. A human buddy is for wanting somebody quietly getting on with their day at the edge of your screen.
Seeing one first
The playground on our home page is one of the characters in your browser, full size and turnable. That is the fastest way to tell whether a human desktop character is what you actually wanted.