BigFoot 2.2 : Happy feet for your desktop
NOTE: BigFoot has not been updated in several years, and does not work on recent versions of OS X.
BigFoot is a Mac OS X "desktop critter" that provides you with endless entertainment, in the form of a pair of feet. But not just any feet! These peripatetic companions walk around your desktop, mostly minding their own business, but occasionally interacting with you in various ways. They dance, chase the mouse, play hopscotch, and lots of other things. Their appearance and behavior is extremely configurable; some appearance styles are shown here, and their configuration panel is shown below.
This is a very basic style for the foot; plain black, with a light shadow for depth. As you can see, the size of the feet is adjustable.
The engine from Aquatint is part of BigFoot, so you can easily get Aquatinted feet like these. These two examples show how you can vary the depth of the shadow cast by the feet, also.
Other styles of foot are provided; dress shoes for those fancy occasions, for example. Both of these images are using the Aquatint engine, too.
For less formal outings, sneakers are provided. The first image shows another style of colorizing, with solid black outlines around translucent colored interiors.
These images show off some of the more sophisticated effects BigFoot has to offer: transparency, and rainbowing.
And you can make your own!The last example shows the footprints of a theropod (a type of carnivorous dinosaur). These foot images were made by Armin Briegel, BigFoot's German localizer. You can make your own feet, of whatever sort you like. You could even make tracings of your own footprints, or your baby's! You can download a pair of cat pawprint images, made by Martin Libich, by clicking here. If you make your own foot images that you'd like to make public, drop us a line!
All of these settings (and more) are user-controllable, so you can make a set of feet to suit your individual needs. The personality of the feet is equally configurable (although that's hard to demonstrate here). Here's a reduced snapshot of the Stick Software-style overengineered preferences panel (click here for a full-size version):
If this seems complicated, there is an online manual to help you out (for a 140K PDF version of this manual that can be used offline, click here). But BigFoot is really very simple and intuitive to use, and to be honest, the manual doesn't bother explaining most of the controls in the preferences panel, because they just don't need it, and because discovery and experimentation is part of the fun of BigFoot.
BigFoot is shareware (which means we rely on you to pay for it if you use it). It costs $10. Feel free to try it out for a little while before paying, but please don't forget that it is ultimately your responsibility to pay for it if you use it. For details on how we handle registrations, see our main registration page. Thanks!
The new icon for BigFoot, added in version 2.2, was created by Alexander MacLean of widgetwidget.com. Thanks, Alexander!
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