PIP on your desktop, for Windows and Mac
Your gull no longer has to wait in a browser tab. From today PIP has a desktop app for Windows and Mac: he lives on your screen while you work and joins you when you fly. Get it on skydex.online/pet.
What he does on the desktop
PIP walks along the bottom of the screen above the taskbar or Dock, sits, plays and falls asleep when nobody pays attention to him. If you leave him alone long enough he gets bored. Then he hops over to your other monitor, or chases the mouse until you click him.
He answers you, too. A click makes him hop with a heart, and a click on his head makes him tilt it. Two quick clicks give you a full turn. Three make him flip, with confetti. Stroke him with the cursor, back and forth, and he melts. You can pick him up and put him anywhere on the screen.
On a Mac he belongs to the monitor rather than one desktop, so swiping between Spaces doesn't leave him behind, and he can stand over a fullscreen app.
The same PIP as in the game
Link the app to your account (his menu, Link to Skydex, then confirm the code on the site) and he wears your PIP's colours, gear and stage. When you take off he leaves the desktop and turns up beside you as your wingman. Pause, land or close the tab and he flies home. He is never in both places at once.
If you'd rather keep him on the desktop, turn on Stay on the desktop during flights in his menu. Then a small plane badge sits by his head while you fly, your catches pop over him with their icon, +1 and points, and H in the game sends him a heart.
New rows in your bell show up as a bubble in your language, and a rare aircraft over your antenna opens the live map right on it.
Quiet when you need it
Four modes in his menu: Active, Calm, Focus and Sleep. When a film, a game or a call goes fullscreen, he switches to Focus by himself and keeps his bubbles until you're back. His icon lives in the menu bar on a Mac and in the tray on Windows.
He is light: on a Mac at rest he takes about 0.6% of the processor and 140 MB of memory. He doesn't read your screen. To notice a fullscreen app he only looks at where windows are and how big, never at their titles or what's in them, and he asks for no screen recording permission. Anonymous usage stats (no account, no names) can be turned off in his menu.
Getting it
The Mac version is signed and notarized by Apple and needs macOS 12 or newer. The Windows build is a zip for Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. It isn't in the Microsoft Store yet, so SmartScreen will warn you on the first start: choose More info, then Run anyway. A Store version that updates itself comes later. Until then the app checks once a day and tells you when a new version is out.
PIP is free with a Skydex account. Without one he still lives on your desktop as the plain Chick. Your linked computers are listed on /my/pet, where you can unlink any of them.
This is the first public build, so tell us what goes wrong on Discord. If you haven't hatched PIP yet, start with Meet PIP.