My Mac OSX is insuffciently infested.

October 8, 2010 4:46 PM

Windows has Shimeji, Linux has xpenguins ... what does Macintosh have?

I'm talking about the animated window-manager decorations that crawl around the unused space on your screen.

• Shimeji makes use of the Java to draw little mushroom dudes on the foreground screen, even interact with windows (grabbing them and throwing them off-screen... can be switched off). Whatever os hooks used by Shimeji from the JavaVM don't seem to exist in other non-Microsoft JavaVMs.
• Xpenguins for any UNIX system w/ X11 (which includes just about every Linux distro) has little dudes that drop in and scoot around any uncovered root window areas, falling off the tops of windows or getting squished when you move windows on top. (X11 on neither Windows nor Macintosh use a root window, so no xpenguins).
• _this_space_left_blank_ does similar things for Macintosh. Or would, if I knew what it was.

A nice feature of both Shimeji and Xpenguins is the ability to make custom artwork and animations for making new original dudes. I'd think the Macintosh equivalent would too, but I'm not expecting miracles.

posted by Mozai to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Maybe someone could port xpenguins to include little Hexleys.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 4:50 PM on October 8, 2010

Xsnow was originally for the Mac and has come full circle with an OS X port. It's not quite as dynamic as Shimeji or Xpenguins.

There's also a port of Neko for the Mac.
posted by jedicus at 5:31 PM on October 8, 2010

Response by poster:

• xsnow found, and found again.
• xteddy found, and found again

Having a too much trouble finding neko/oneko for Macintosh... there's something else called "neko" that is adding too much noise into my keyword searches. Probably why the Linux distros decided to rename the classic X11 app to "oneko" in their collections.
posted by Mozai at 5:52 PM on October 8, 2010

Best answer: Here's a page for Neko for OS X.
posted by jedicus at 6:20 PM on October 8, 2010