Pipling

Most desk pets are a picture that changes. Pipling is a small animal living in a window cut into your Stream Deck — one continuous world stretched across the keys you give it, with the bezels acting as the frame rather than chopping it into separate icons.

It arrives as an egg. Tap it a few times and the shell pips, cracks, and something climbs out: one of 512 creatures. A seed decides its shell, its lineage, its nuance, and with them its name, its colours, how it moves and the biome it lives in. The same seed always hatches the same creature, so you can note one down and find it again — or lay a fresh egg whenever you like.

HABITAT: Drop this on a block of keys and the world fills exactly those tiles. Add or remove a key and it resizes on the spot: more keys, more world, never a crop and never a row of separate thumbnails. Two by two is the size the art is drawn for; a smaller block still works, with less room to move. The art is drawn per device family rather than scaled up from one size, so a Mini, a Neo, an MK.2 and an XL each get their own resolution.

EVERY CARE KEY IS A GAUGE: There is a bar along the top of each one, and a lit key is a key asking to be pressed. That is the whole of the interface; nothing is hidden in a menu.

FEED and WATER show stock: what is left in the bowl and the dish, not how hungry it is. Your creature helps itself between presses, walking over to eat and drink on its own. A full bowl lasts most of a working day. The bar runs green while there is plenty and turns amber as it runs out.

PLAY and PET show desire: a want that builds on its own while it waits. Grey while it is content, pink once it is asking. A tap answers it and the bar drops back. A want left unanswered slowly costs it some happiness, so it is worth noticing.

CLEAN sweeps up after it. NAME spells out what it is called across the habitat, and holding any key for half a second does the same, whatever that key does on a tap.

GROWING UP: An untouched egg hatches in about twenty minutes; tapping it is faster. From there it is a juvenile for a few hours and grown after roughly a day at the desk. Age accrues only while the plugin is actually running, so closing the lid is a pause rather than neglect. Nothing here starves while you are on holiday, and nothing dies while you are in a meeting.

It is quiet by design: no notifications, no sounds, no pop-ups, and nothing that needs answering on a schedule. It sits there and gets on with its life in the corner of your desk.

No account, no sign-in, no network requests, no analytics. Your creature lives in Stream Deck's own settings, on your machine, and nothing about it leaves the device.

Works on Stream Deck Mini, Neo, Plus, MK.2 and XL, on macOS and Windows. Requires the Stream Deck app 7.1 or newer.

A backup that survives a crash

Pipling now keeps its own backup of your Pipling on your computer, alongside Stream Deck's copy.

If a forced restart or a crash leaves Stream Deck's copy empty or out of date, Pipling brings your Pipling back by itself.

Your Pipling is backed up the first time this version starts, so there is nothing to do.

Your Pipling carries on as it was.