Official User Guide

LiPet User & Feature Guide

An honest, developer-written guide to your 3D screen companion. Learn how autonomous behavior loops work, how to map gestures across body zones, how to orchestrate action frequencies, and how to install cloud skills without updating the app binary.

In Active Development: LiPet is actively evolving. The architectures, touch models, and parameters documented below reflect our verified engine design and specifications, but visual controls and fine timings may be tuned before the final 1.0 release.

1. Interacting with Your Pet

LiPet is not a looping animated GIF. Every poke, drag, or double-click is governed by an autonomous gesture arbitration engine.

Single-Click Contextual Touch Responses

When clicked, the pet does not randomly jump to an unrelated animation. It first plays an immediate 2–3 frame acknowledgment so it visibly notices your cursor, then branches into a natural reaction based on its current posture:

  • Standing: Tilts its head with curiosity, blinks slowly, or raises a front paw.
  • Sleeping: Twitches its ears, lazily opens one eye, stretches, and drifts back to sleep if undisturbed.
  • Grooming: Pauses paw-licking, looks up at you, and acknowledges your touch.
  • Walking: Stops smoothly in its stride without abrupt frame jumping, turning toward the touch point.

Consecutive Poking & The Grumpy Threshold

A gentle tap earns affection. However, rapid repeated pokes within 3 seconds increment the internal touchSaturation counter:

  • First touch: Friendly curious response and ear orientation.
  • Second touch (within ~1.5s): Continuation of the current response sequence.
  • Third touch (within ~3s): Saturation threshold reached — the cat swats at your pointer with its paw, twitches its tail, or turns its back in annoyance.
  • Cooldown: After ~6 seconds without poking, the saturation counter resets and your pet is calm again.

Double-Click & Gesture Arbitration Window

To prevent double-clicks from triggering unwanted single-click touch reactions, LiPet runs a ~250ms gesture arbitration window. When double-click bindings or the companion assistant entry are configured on a body zone, the first tap holds candidate state. If a second click occurs within ~250ms and ~6 physical pixels, the single-click reaction is cleanly cancelled, opening the Pet Card / Companion Panel directly.

Long-Press & Draggable Physics

Holding your primary mouse button down for ~500ms without moving triggers any bound long-press skill action. If you move past 4–6 physical pixels, control immediately transfers to native dragging:

  • Lifted by Scruff: The pet transitions to its hanging "lifted" posture (被拎起) and its ground shadow detaches.
  • Multi-Display Movement: Drag your pet across displays, menu bars, and external screens freely.
  • Soft Landing: On release, it plays a landing cushion animation (落地), checks its new surroundings, and rests during a 20–60s cooldown before deciding whether to walk back to its favorite home corner.

2. Body Touch Mapping

Turn your desktop cat into an interactive command hub by mapping body zones to custom gestures and skills.

Four Partition Layouts

The Pet Center allows you to divide your pet’s visible body into one of four data layouts:

  • whole — Entire body treated as a single trigger zone (all).
  • rows2 — Split horizontally into top (ears, head, upper back) and bottom (belly, paws, tail).
  • cols2 — Split vertically into left (front face & chest) and right (hindquarters & tail).
  • grid3 — A 3×3 matrix of 9 precision zones (r1c1 through r3c3) for multi-skill power users.

Alpha-Tested Pixel Masking

Touch zones are computed strictly across the pet’s non-transparent visible pixels. Transparent window areas allow full click-through to underlying macOS apps, editors, and browser windows without accidental hits.

Independent Gesture Bindings

Each body zone supports independent bindings for tap, double-tap, and long-press. For example, assign tapping the head to fetch local weather, double-tapping the belly to inspect AI quota balances, and long-pressing the back to bring up the system resource gauge.

Pet Center Synchronized Storage

Touch mappings are per-pet user data stored alongside the behavior table. Synced via revision locks, ensuring your customized layout persists across updates and multiple Mac workstations.

3. Behavior Orchestration

Fine-tune how often your pet walks, naps, grooms, and reacts to your desktop environment.

Five-Tier Frequency Weights

Frequencies in LiPet are relative weights in the autonomous behavior selector, not rigid interval timers:

  • 1 — Very Rare (极罕见): Special rare actions.
  • 10 — Rare (罕见): Occasional stretches and playful pounces.
  • 50 — Sometimes (中 / 默认): Balanced default cadence for grooming and walking.
  • 100 — Often (经常): High-frequency curiosity and looking around.
  • 200 — Frequent (频繁): Active exploratory routines.

Allow Spontaneous Toggle

Every behavior action features an independent [Allow Spontaneous] switch. When disabled, the action will never start on its own; it will only trigger as a follow-up chain from another action or through an external event.

Sprite Frame Animation & On-Demand Engine

LiPet renders animations using lightweight sprite frames, capping rendering frame rates at each asset’s native frame rate. The behavior engine schedules decisions dynamically on demand rather than running fixed polling loops. When your screen is locked or the Mac enters sleep, the engine stops completely with zero background resource usage.

External Environment & Event Bindings

Connect your desktop pet to external system signals and live events:

  • Weather Triggers: Rain outside causes the pet to shake its fur; winter cold triggers shivering and curled-up sleep.
  • macOS Focus / Do-Not-Disturb: Automatically transitions the pet into quiet mode (no popups, restful napping).
  • Screen Sharing & Fullscreen: Pet stays unobtrusively docked at screen margins.

4. Skills & Plugins System

Expand your pet’s capabilities with cloud-delivered skill data packets that install in seconds without app updates.

Declarative Cloud Data Packets

Unlike traditional apps that require binary downloads or complex code sandboxes, LiPet skills are distributed as declarative data packets containing UI manifests, API endpoints, and command definitions. Official skills are delivered instantly from the cloud.

Transparent Permission Model

When installing a skill from the collection browser, you are presented with a clear permission breakdown (such as network API domains, notification permissions, and background refresh cadence). Privileged operations are strictly whitelisted and isolated.

Multi-Surface Delivery Pipeline

Skill outputs route cleanly through dedicated presentation surfaces:

  • L1 Pet Bubble: Concise, single-line headline summary when immediate attention is helpful.
  • L2 Timeline Panel: Silent chronological log of past queries, quota balances, and weather updates.
  • L0 Pet Action: Physical pet reactions (such as happy dances or alerts) without annoying modal popups.

AI Quota Balances & System Gauges

Monitor your OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, and Google Gemini API balances through built-in gauge cards. Check quota rings and remaining credits with a single tap on your cat’s paws.

5. Menu Bar & Dock Presence

Configure how LiPet displays across your Mac desktop, Dock, and menu bar.

Menu Bar Tray and Dock Controls

Customize LiPet’s visibility across macOS system surfaces:

  • Menu Bar Tray Icon: Displays a discreet icon in the macOS menu bar for quick status and menu access.
  • Dock Icon: Shows LiPet in the macOS Dock for standard window management and switcher presence.

Dock Icon Follows Your Pet

When the Dock icon is enabled, dynamic avatar synchronization updates the icon in real time to match your pet’s appearance, color variations, and mood.

Guaranteed Recovery Surface

The presence system enforces a safety invariant: you cannot disable both the Dock icon and the Menu Bar tray icon at the same time. At least one recovery surface always remains accessible so you never lose access to preferences.

LiPet · In Active Development