Chick — A tiny menagerie for your Mac desktop

🐤 Chicks

Seven art styles, one chick

Same animation system, completely different aesthetic. Switch live from the menu bar — every chick on screen morphs at once.

Anime

Cel-shaded kawaii. Default style.

Realistic

Photo-real baby chick.

Memoji

3D plastic-sticker emoji vibe.

Lego

Built from blocky bricks.

Embroidered

Stitched fabric patch.

Oil Painting

Brushstroke portrait.

PSX Low-Poly

Late-90s 3D nostalgia.

🐰 Bunnies

And seven hopping bunnies

A second species in the same shared art styles. Bunnies hop with a parabolic arc, take coop breaks, and panic-bolt from the cursor — just like chicks, but bouncier.

Anime

Cream fur, pink ears, sparkly eyes.

Realistic

Black-and-white spotted bunny.

Memoji

3D-rendered plush sticker.

Lego

Brick-built minifigure pet.

Embroidered

Felted patchwork hare.

Oil Painting

Soft impressionist hare.

PSX Low-Poly

Tri-planar fur, vertex wobble.

🐍 Snakes

Eight procedural snakes

No spritesheets — bodies are simulated with follow-the-leader physics and lateral undulation, then drawn as a continuous Catmull-Rom ribbon. Eight pattern templates ride that single body.

Emerald Tree Boa

Green base, dorsal stripe.

Coral Snake

Alternating warning bands.

Diamondback

Earth body, diamond checkers.

Albino Burmese

Cream body, peach blotches.

Garter Snake

Forest green, yellow stripe.

Milk Snake

Crimson with cream rings.

Ball Python

Tan body, dark blotches.

Black Racer

Solid jet body, no markings.

Hit ⌘R to randomise every snake on screen.

What it does

🐤

Three species, one menagerie

Chicks walk, bunnies hop in parabolic arcs, snakes slither with realistic lateral undulation. Each lives in its own borderless window — together they wander your desktop without overlapping each other's logic.

🏠

Chicken coop island

Drag the floating coop wherever you like. Click on it to summon a random spawn — chick or bunny, any of eight tints. Critters periodically wander home, take a nap inside, and re-emerge.

🐍

Procedural snake biomechanics

Snakes aren't sprites. The head undulates sinusoidally, the body trail-follows it at fixed arc-length spacing, and a 56-segment Catmull-Rom ribbon renders the silhouette every frame. Eight pattern templates skin the same simulator.

🌈

Eight tints, applied two ways

Chicks tint via hue rotation (works on yellow). Bunnies tint via channel multiply (works on white fur). Either way: pink, mint, lavender, blue, red, white, brown, and the original yellow.

🎵

Synthesised chirps

22 chirp variants generated live from real-world bioacoustic data — not pre-recorded samples. Every click sounds slightly different.

🪶

Cursor reactivity

Chicks dart away in a panic when the cursor crosses them. Bunnies enter rapid-fire flee-hops. Snakes ignore you — they're cold-blooded.

🖥️

Multi-monitor

Wandering goals are picked from the union of every connected display's visible frame. Critters cross monitor seams seamlessly.

⚡

Practically free

Idle critters consume no CPU. Active animation hovers around 1–3 % on a single core, even with all three species spawned together.

Download

Chick.app

macOS 13 (Ventura) and newer · Universal · Free · ~3 MB

Download .zip

First-time install — read this if macOS blocks the app

Unzip Chick.zip and drag Chick.app into ~/Applications.
macOS marks unsigned apps downloaded from the internet as “damaged”. Open Terminal and run this once to strip the quarantine flag:
```
xattr -cr ~/Applications/Chick.app
```
Then double-click the app to launch it.
Alternative without Terminal: right-click Chick.app → Open, then click Open in the dialog. Subsequent launches work normally.
The chick (and a bunny, if installed) appears in the centre of your screen. The 🐤 menu-bar icon hosts every control: ⌘N spawn chick, ⌘B spawn bunny, ⌘S spawn snake, ⌘R randomise snakes, ⌘I toggle the coop island, plus style switching.

Or build from source: git clone && ./build.sh && open Chick.app