Case file 002 · Mac app

BARNACLE

A tiny pixel pet that lives in your Mac’s menu bar.

COMING SOON

CLIENT

Swamp Kitten original

OUR ROLE

Concept, product design, visual system, Mac app, website

PLATFORM

macOS 13 or later · free

STATUS

Headed to the Mac App Store

01THE IDEA

A pocket pet for people who live at their desks. Barnacle bobs along at the top of the screen while you work and lets you know when it needs you. Click it and a little handheld screen opens.

Look after it and it grows from an egg into a baby, a kid, a teen and an adult over about a week, and how you raised it shows in how it turns out.

02DESIGNED TO BE KIND

Most virtual pets punish you for having a life. Barnacle doesn’t.

• It never dies. It can get hungry, bored or messy, but that’s it.
• It sleeps when you do. It goes to bed on its own from 10pm to 7am.
• Closing your laptop is fine. It doesn’t starve while you’re away.
• Gentle nudges. A little ! in the menu bar, plus notifications you can turn off.
• Four verbs, nothing more: Feed, Play, Clean and Sleep.
• Quiet by default. It lives in the menu bar with no Dock icon.

03THE VISUAL SYSTEM

A retro handheld LCD with chunky pixel art: dark graphite panels around a pale green screen. It follows the Mac’s light and dark mode, and every pixel renders crisp, with no smoothing.

04WHAT SWAMP KITTEN DID

• Concept and product design: the pet, its life stages and the rules that keep it kind
• Visual system: the handheld LCD look, type, color and pixel art direction
• The Mac app: a menu bar app with notifications and light and dark mode
• Privacy by design: no accounts, no ads, no data collected, ever
• The website: product, support and privacy pages, plus a launch list