Hey Product Hunt 👋

I’m Charles, and I made DummyPet, a cartoon dog that lives along the bottom of your Mac screen.

Most of the time it does its own thing. It wanders, sniffs around, naps when it’s tired, and now and then digs up a sock. When it wants something, a little speech bubble pops up.

You can feed it, walk it (your cursor holds the leash), give it a bath, and flick a tennis ball across your screen for fetch. The more you play with it, the more tricks it learns. There are eight. Save the backflip for last.

I really didn’t want it to get in the way, so clicks pass straight through to whatever’s behind it unless you’re touching the dog or one of its toys. It’s also small: native Swift, under 2 MB, and the dog and its barks are all drawn and synthesized in code. It never goes online either. No account, nothing tracked, the stats just live on your Mac.

One heads up: it isn’t notarized by Apple yet, so macOS will ask before the first launch. The download page walks you through it.

It’s free and open source. If you want to meet the dog before installing anything, there’s a playable one on the website.

What should it learn next? Taking trick requests 🐶