Window sitter

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A window sitter (also known as a desktop sitter) is a small graphical application that displays a character sitting on top of other application windows running on a computer.

The character is often a cute animal or a super deformed anime character.^{[citation needed]}

Most window sitters are limited to sitting on one window at a time, but users can load as many window sitters as they like.

[edit] Implementation

Window sitters are typically implemented as finite state machine, and can have different states for blinking, tired, angry, and other "emotions". The state machine allows jumps between different states, and often respond to outside stimuli, such as being clicked.

In theory, a very complex window sitter could walk around, jump between windows, and do other complicated tasks; however, due to the limitations on the filesizes of the images involved, the amount of animation necessary for certain tasks, and the rapidly increasing complexity of the finite state machine as new tasks are introduced, most window sitters only have a few animations.

[edit] Programs Available

Some well-known window sitter programs include:

• Otaku Mascot for Windows
• MaCoPiX for Windows or Linux/Unix (in Japanese)
• XAyanami, one of the first window sitters (no longer available).

Other known window sitters:

• ActWin32 from Elemental Soft (discontinued)
• Wintop2 (discontinued)
• Esheep
• Apricot (in japanese)

Both Actwin32 and WinTop2, despite their age, are still usable under Windows XP and Vista. Esheep and Apricot are also known to work under Windows XP.