Wellness Cat

Inspiration

We set out to build an interactive application that answered wellness concerns for software engineers, digital workers, writers---really anyone who works long hours in front of a screen. After much discussion, we decided to synthesize our passion for health & wellness with our love for adorable kittens, and Wellness Cat was born!

What it does

A cute kitten that hangs out on your taskbar while you work, Wellness Cat keeps you company and reminds you to take care of yourself with timed reminders for wellness activities.

How we built it

We took build inspiration from Desktop Goose (https://samperson.itch.io/desktop-goose) and Desktop Pet (https://github.com/wkostusiak/desktop-pet), then split into groups based on tasks. Ethan worked on front-end for the cat animations, Walker worked on click-based interaction, and Yura and Katherine developed the wellness reminder system.

Challenges we ran into

We spent a ton of time trying to add a Pomodoro timer feature, but it was buggy until we eventually scrapped it for a future iteration of the app. Also, the GUI we chose, Tkinter, has trouble with image transparency on MacOS, which was a struggle to deal with between different operating systems.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're thrilled to present an adorable desktop pet that we believe will help users stay healthy while working digitally!

What we learned

Most of us hadn't used Python in a while, so we were happy to have an opportunity to brush up on a wide-reaching, high-level language with tons of applications.

What's next for Wellness Cat

We have four more cat sprites lined up and plans to enable Wellness Cat to climb up windows, run, dash, play with the user's cursor, and more! More reminders can be easily added, and we plan to implement a customization menu for custom prompt creation and timer settings. We also plan to integrate Wellness Cat with a Pomodoro-style study timer to help you stay on task while coding!