Window sitter

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A window sitter, sometimes known as a desktop sitter, is a 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.

Window sitters are typically implemented as finite state machine, and have different states for blinking, tired, angry, and other "emotions". The state machine allows jumps between different states, and can sometimes 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, but the size of the graphics would be prohibitive, as most window sitters use graphics drawn by end-users. Most window sitters are limited to sitting on one window at a time, but users can load as many window sitters as they like.

Some well-known window sitter programs are Otaku Mascot for Windows, MaCoPiX for Windows or Linux/Unix (in Japanese), and XAyanami, one of the first window sitters (no longer available). Other windows sitters include ActWin32 from Elemental Soft, which seems to have been discontinued, and Wintop2, also, unfortunately, discontinued. Both Actwin32 and WinTop2, despite their age, are still usable under Windows Xp and Vista.