Deskmate

The problem

Desktop pets are fun until they need an account, an internet connection, or a cloud service to make one look like you. I wanted one that is free, private by design, and turns a single photo into your own pixel-art avatar without the photo ever leaving the computer.

The solution

A Tauri 2 app with two windows over a deliberately narrow Rust backend: a transparent always-on-top pet that walks along the bottom of your window, naps, dances to music and reacts to Feed / Wash / Play, and a care panel whose stats drift over time. "Make him you" runs MediaPipe face landmarking and selfie segmentation on-device to read hair style, beard, skin tone and clothing, then reshapes and recolours every frame of the sprite sheet part by part. GitHub Actions builds installers for Windows, macOS (Apple chip and Intel) and Linux on every release tag; it started life as an Omarchy shell plugin in QML.