Report to shareholders
Dear shareholders,
The 2026 financial year was in line with expectations. We opened no office, hired no one and turned no profit. The cat is satisfied.
Our mandate is unchanged: one cat head on every Finder window. Any person holding at least one open window is deemed a shareholder. The dividend is paid in purrs, on the third stroke.
The Cat, Chairman
Business lines
| Activity | How | Return |
|---|---|---|
| Pet | Stroke a head with the mouse, three times. Then click it. | Purring, hearts, one small hop |
| Shake | Shake a window, firmly. Moving it is not enough. | 3.0 s of dizziness |
| Drag | Move a window by its title bar. | 2 paws, holding on |
Coat portfolio
One coat is drawn at random at every launch, never the same twice in a row, unless you pick one yourself from the paw menu: then it stays. Click a coat and the desktop above adopts it.
Questions from shareholders
None of them. macOS can no longer be themed, and Miaou changes nothing in the Finder. It paints its cats on a transparent layer laid over your windows, while you keep working.
Like any private bank worth its name, Miaou knows the outline of your windows and never what is inside them: where they are, what the mouse is doing, how long ago the Mac was last touched, and whether you prefer light or dark and reduced motion. It never reads a window title, never sees a pixel, never hears a key.
No. It is painted on top of everything, and Miaou erases whatever a window in front should hide. Please don’t tell the cat.
Yes. Clicks go straight through the layer, except on a head. Clicking a cat does not take the keyboard away from the app you are working in.
Measured on a 2020 MacBook Pro with an Apple M1: about 1% of one core while nothing moves, around 10% for the few seconds you play, and some 30 MB of memory. When you step away, it checks on your windows less often. I have not measured battery life, so I make no claim about it.
Finder windows, out of the box. The paw menu extends the offer to every window; the fit is tailored for the Finder, and a little looser elsewhere.
Push a window up against the menu bar and the head comes out of a free side. Enlarge it until it fills the screen and the cat hangs from the menu bar, upside down. During Mission Control, the heads stay where they are and wait.
Paw menu, Quit Miaou. It starts on its own only if you ask it to (Open at login, in the same menu) and installs nothing outside itself: untick Open at login, drag the app to the Bin and it is gone, apart from one small preferences file that remembers your coat.
Miaou asks for nothing, connects to nothing, and runs inside Apple’s App Sandbox. Apple reviews every version before it reaches the Mac App Store.
Yes, with Claude (Anthropic) as a pair-programmer. Every behaviour is checked by a test sheet before each release; a failing sheet blocks it.
Inspired by Scratch’s Cat Blocks, the hat blocks that grew a cat face and ears for April Fools’ Day 2020.
What you need
macOS 14 or later. Tested on an Apple M1; it also runs on Intel Macs, though the cat has yet to sit on one.
Miaou never asks for Screen Recording, Accessibility or Input Monitoring, and runs inside Apple’s App Sandbox.
It installs Miaou and keeps it up to date. A place there costs the house 99 dollars a year; the cat approved the budget, reluctantly.
Free. No ads, no account. The cat takes no commission.