Desktop Zoomies puts a little cat (or twenty) on your screen. It climbs your windows and its own cat tree, perches on your buttons and shelves, naps in its bed, chases a laser, gets tangled in yarn, pulls up a desk and types right along with you, and when you put some music on, it spins the records.
Like any cat, it would rather be up high. It hops from ledge to ledge, from the bottom of the screen to the tops of windows and the buttons, text fields and lists inside them. When a ledge is out of reach, it scrambles up the side of the window like a curtain.
When you've been typing for a while, the nearest cat sits down behind a little desk, facing you, monocle firmly in place, and hammers away at a typewriter in time with your keystrokes: the carriage slides, lines fill the page, and it dings at the end of every line.
Take a break and it stretches, has a quick groom, and gets back to being a cat.
Play music on your Mac and, after a few seconds, a cat sets up a DJ booth, pulls on its headphones and gets to work: scratching a record with one paw, pumping the other in the air, nodding along to the beat with its eyes closed while notes float up.
With more than one cat, it's never the one at the typewriter. Stop the music and the set's over: it packs up and goes back to being a cat. (Turn it off with Options → DJ When Music Plays.)
Drop a little laser turret anywhere on screen (⌃⌥L). It swivels and shines its beam at a red dot, which it steers around the cats in a random pattern built to get them moving: skittering along their ledge and stopping just out of reach, darting across so they have to hop, hovering overhead so they leap, and zig-zagging until they lose their minds.
Drag the toy wherever you like; click it to switch the beam off. Afterwards the cats look around, baffled, and groom to save face.
Every so often a cat finds a ball of yarn to bat around, or you can toss one in (⌃⌥T). As it rolls it unwinds, leaving a strand across your screen that drapes over the edges of windows, and the ball gets smaller and smaller until it's all used up.
Cats that find the loose yarn flop onto their backs and roll around in it, then wander about wrapped up for a while before shaking it off.
Give your cat a plush bed (⌃⌥B) and drag it anywhere. It's the favourite nap spot, and a cat in the bed rides along when you move it. In between naps they groom: paw licking, face washing, back licking, and the classic leg-straight-up-in-the-air pose.
Move the mouse slowly back and forth over a cat to pet it, even a sleeping one, and it purrs.
Give the cats somewhere to climb (Furniture in the menu). The cat tree (⌃⌥R) has three fluffy platforms they love to sit on, and pom-poms on strings that they come over to bat until they swing.
Add wooden shelves and cloud ledges anywhere on your screen, as many as you like. Drag any piece where you want it; a cat on it rides along, and everything stays put for next time.
Sometimes a cat rears up, scratches at the screen with a few swipes of its claws, tears a hole right into whatever app is behind it, dives in, and pops out of a fresh hole somewhere else entirely. The claw marks fade away afterwards. (⌃⌥H to see it on demand.)
At 8 AM and 8 PM (or whenever you set) the cats get the zoomies for ten minutes: tails puffed up, eyes wide, sprinting, spinning, and hopping all over your screen. Start a round yourself any time with ⌃⌥Z.
Orange tabby, gray tabby, black, tuxedo, white or calico, and each cat can be a different one: Add a Cat… shows you the six to choose from. Small, medium or large.
Whip the mouse around and a cat may give chase. Let it rest nearby and it stalks, wiggles and pounces.
Sometimes it trots along the top of the field you're typing in, batting at the caret.
Cats aren't clingy, so by default it ignores you. Turn it up and it follows you around, at a polite distance.
One cat not enough? Add them in Settings, picking each one's coat, or add 20 at once. Each one has a mind of its own.
It curls up on window tops when it's tired. Wiggle the mouse nearby to wake it.
Open Settings (⌘, from the cat menu) to see all your cats, change any one's coat, remove one, or add another.
Everything in the cat menu is grouped: Play, Zoomies, Furniture, Cats and Options.
Lives in your menu bar, starts with your Mac, and stays out of your way.
Download it free and live with one cat for as long as you like. Buy a licence and unlock everything, on up to two of your Macs.
One cat, in any coat, that climbs your windows and buttons, purrs when you pet it, chases your cursor, naps, grooms and does the hole trick.
As many cats as you like (each its own coat, or twenty at once), the cat bed, cat tree, shelves and cloud ledges, the ball of yarn and the laser toy, the zoomies, the typewriter, the DJ, and keeping the cats on one screen of your choice.
Buy through Polar, our shop. Your licence key arrives by email: choose Unlock Desktop Zoomies… in the cat menu and paste it in. It's yours to keep.
These work from any app. Everything is also in the cat menu in your menu bar.
| ⌃⌥Z | Zoomies for 5 minutes (press again to stop) |
| ⌃⌥T | Toss a ball of yarn |
| ⌃⌥B | Show or hide the cat bed |
| ⌃⌥R | Show or hide the cat tree |
| ⌃⌥H | Do the hole trick |
| ⌃⌥N | Nap time |
| ⌃⌥L | Laser toy on or off |
Nothing about you leaves your Mac. Desktop Zoomies has no accounts and no analytics. The only time it goes online is to check a licence key with Polar, our shop: when you unlock it, and about once a week after. The free version never goes online.
With Accessibility access it reads only where buttons and fields are on screen, never what's in them, skips password fields entirely, and never clicks or types. For the typewriter it counts that a key was pressed, never which key. For the DJ it notices that something is playing sound, never what, and it never listens to it.
Without the permission the cats still roam the tops of your windows.
Requires macOS 13 Ventura or newer. Runs natively on Apple silicon and Intel Macs.