pixelpal

Not everything has to be useful. pixelpal is a tiny pixel-art house that sits on my desktop with a light-blue blob living inside it.

What it does

The blob idles, walks around, sleeps, and wanders out through the door on its own schedule. Click it and it waves back. That’s the whole thing — and that’s the point.

How it works

It’s a small SwiftUI macOS app, but built without Xcode. It’s a plain Swift Package with a build.sh that wraps the compiled binary into a proper .app, sets LSUIElement so it lives as a desktop layer instead of a normal window, and ships. Doing it that way was most of the fun — figuring out what an .app actually is underneath the IDE.

Where it is

MVP shipped: the character runs its full idle / walk / sleep / leave / wave routine. If I come back to it: sharper sprite art, and click-through on the transparent window corners so it doesn’t eat clicks meant for what’s behind it.