desktop cat

Inspiration

This project was inspired by Desktop Goose and other virtual pets. In theory, it's a combination between a virtual pet and a to-do list. Just a small little thing to keep company and send reminders on the 5th hour of debugging that one cs assignment.

What it does

The application runs in the background, giving you a small cat that walks around the bottom of the screen. When hovering over the pet, the cat will stop moving and give a reminder that the user can change. Clicking on the pet pulls up a task sheet in Google Chrome that the user can freely edit; all edits will be saved and reopened next time the user clicks on the cat.

How we built it

This project is built half on Python and half on Javascript. The virtual pet was created mostly using functions from Python's tkinter GUI. The task list was implemented as a normal webpage which saved to and read from a local JSON file (where we stored the cookies haha...). The two parts of the project interacted with each other by having the cat be a link to the index.html for the task sheet, pulling up the to-do list in Google Chrome.

Challenges we ran into

The desktop pet API using Python's tkinter only works on the Windows environment. Having one of the team members working on the Mac environment and another on Windows made it extra hard to debug when things kept breaking. It was also a problem of having an idea what to do and absolutely no idea how to do it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Honestly, even getting the project to run within the time limit was super cool.

What we learned

We both learned a lot about the respective packages and environments we worked in. Although pretty scuffed coding, both of us feel comfortable enough to goof around and care about aesthetics towards the end of the project :D