Virtual desktop pet cats for macOS — pixel art cats that live on your dock, chat with you via Ollama LLM, and debate ideas together to help you brainstorm and refine your thoughts.

🎥 Prefer a smoother experience? Watch the full demo video on YouTube

• Dock companion — Cats walk along your dock with pixel-perfect animations
• Window perching — When dock auto-hides, cats teleport to sit on top of your active window
• Multi-cat — Up to 7 cats with distinct colors and personalities
• AI chat — Click a cat to open a pixel-art chat bubble, powered by Ollama
• Cat Debate mode — Your cats debate any topic together! Each cat argues from its personality, then they synthesize a final answer. A creative brainstorming & idea-refining tool
• Mouse tracking — Cats notice your cursor and turn to look at it. Get too close and they'll chase it!
• Random meows — Cats spontaneously say "Miaou~", "Prrr...", "Mrrp!" in cute speech bubbles
• Pixel art UI — Settings panel, chat bubbles, and controls all in retro pixel style
• Menu bar icon — 🐱 icon with quick access to settings and quit
• Retina ready — Nearest-neighbor scaling keeps pixel art crisp on HiDPI displays
• Multilingual — French, English, Spanish (switch with flag buttons)

Each cat has 368 hand-drawn sprites across 8 directions:

• Walking / Chasing — 8 frames per direction (all 8 directions!)
• Eating — 11 frames per direction
• Drinking — 8 frames per direction
• Angry — 9 frames per direction
• Waking up — 9 frames per direction
• Idle / Looking / Sleeping — Static rotation sprites (8 directions)

• macOS 14+ (Apple Silicon or Intel)
• Ollama running locally (for chat feature, optional)

Grab CATAI.zip from Releases, unzip, then:

xattr -cr CATAI.app   # remove macOS quarantine (app is unsigned)
open CATAI.app

./build.sh
open CATAI.app

swiftc -O -o cat cat.swift -framework AppKit -framework Foundation
./cat

No Xcode project, no dependencies, no package manager — just one Swift file.

Click the 🐱 menu bar icon → Settings:

• Language — 🇫🇷 🇬🇧 🇪🇸 click a flag to switch
• Cats — Click a color bubble to add a cat, click × to remove
• Name — Rename each cat
• Size — Pixel art slider to scale cats
• Ollama model — Select from your installed models
• Debate mode — Toggle on/off to enable multi-cat brainstorming

• Single native Swift file (~2000 lines), no external dependencies

• NSWindow with transparent background for overlay rendering

• CGWindowListCopyWindowInfo for detecting frontmost windows

• Dock auto-hide detection via mouse position polling at 30 FPS

• Color tinting via direct pixel manipulation in sRGB CGContext

• Ollama streaming chat via URLSessionDataDelegate

• Conversation memory persisted in UserDefaults

  

.
├── cat.swift              # Entire application (single file)
├── build.sh               # Build .app bundle script
└── cute_orange_cat/       # Sprite assets
    ├── metadata.json      # Animation & rotation definitions
    ├── rotations/         # 8 static direction sprites (68x68 PNG)
    └── animations/        # 5 animations × 8 directions × 8-11 frames
        ├── angry/
        ├── drinking/
        ├── eating/
        ├── running-8-frames/
        └── waking-getting-up/

• Focused debate — cats now stay strictly on the user-supplied topic
  • System prompt rewritten as 6 strict rules: stay on topic, never derail, attempt creative tasks, personality is just tone, react to others, 2 short sentences
  • Each turn re-asserts the topic in the user message → no more drifting from "write a poem" to "what's a dinosaur"
  • Final synthesis now actually delivers the requested artefact (poem, plan, idea) instead of meta-summarising
• Non-intrusive bubbles — debate bubbles no longer steal focus from your work
  • New passiveMode: ignoresMouseEvents = true, canBecomeKey = false, no input field, no buttons
  • Uses orderFrontRegardless (display only) instead of makeKeyAndOrderFront + NSApp.activate
  • You can keep typing in your editor, switching apps, etc. — the debate just unfolds visually above your cats
• Clicks on cats are ignored during a debate (no accidental flow break)
• Bubbles auto-revert to interactive mode 8s after the synthesis appears

• Debate engine rewritten as a stateful class — eliminates Swift 6 Sendable warnings
  • Validates each cat still exists before its turn (survives mid-debate cat removal)
  • Generation counter invalidates stale callbacks if the debate is stopped
  • DispatchQueue.main.asyncAfter instead of Timer.scheduledTimer from URLSession queue
  • Public stop() called from removeCat and applicationWillTerminate
• Debate button now appears reliably (didSet observer triggers bubble rebuild)
• OllamaChat session race fixed — no more stale callbacks clearing newer requests
• Memory — tintCache bounded (NSCache, 600 items), getPreview cached, orphan mem_<UUID> purged at startup, URLSession properly invalidated
• Robustness — fatalError at startup → NSAlert with clear message, addCat rolls back on failure, frontmostWindowFrame cached (200 ms) to avoid hammering CGWindowListCopyWindowInfo
• Code organisation — BehaviorTuning enum centralizes AI tuning knobs, Dictionary.localized() helper dedupes the L10n fallback pattern
• Build is now clean: zero warnings, zero errors

• Debate mode — Your cats now debate any topic together in a dedicated window
  • Each cat argues from its unique personality (philosopher, geek, poet, scientist...)
  • 3 rounds of discussion where cats react to each other's arguments
  • Final synthesis/consensus by the moderator cat
  • Enable/disable via toggle in Settings
• Debate button in chat bubble — When debate mode is on, a "🎤 Débattre !" button appears in each cat's speech bubble
• Non-streaming Ollama API for reliable multi-turn debate exchanges
• Fix: Chat bubble input no longer loses focus when cat is walking
• CATAI is no longer just a desktop companion — it's now an idea refinement system powered by multiple AI personalities

• New 7th cat: Percy — white-grey cat with a unique personality
• Percy's dad is the "king of the internet" — he drops 80s-90s internet references (Astalavista, GeoCities, Netscape, IRC, BBS, AOL, 56k modems, ICQ...)
• Custom pixel-level desaturation tinting for Percy's white-grey look
• Custom bicolor bubble in the cat color picker
• Cat name displayed in chat bubble
• Performance: Sprite tint cache, conditional image updates, shared mouse polling, reduced dock polling

• Cats now look toward your cursor when it's nearby (8 directions!)
• Cats chase the cursor when it gets close enough
• Sleeping cats wake up if you wave the cursor near them
• Centralized UI color palette for consistency
• Simplified Ollama model fetching
• Fixed angle mapping gap at 360 degrees
• Code optimizations (hypot, removed dead code)

• Fix cats floating after resize or dock refresh
• Fix chat bubble losing position near screen edge
• Remove force unwraps with safe fallbacks
• Fix potential crash in clamshell mode
• Fix memory leak on quit (monitors & timers)
• Fix fragile scale slider timer

• Multi-cat support with 6 color variants
• Distinct AI personalities per color
• Pixel art UI with custom controls
• Walk on dock and window title bars
• Random meow speech bubbles
• Chat memory persistence
• macOS .app bundle with build script

Multiplatform port in progress (Tauri v2) — Windows & Linux coming soon! 🐱✨

A huge thank you to Korben.info for the mention!

MIT