Neko

Neko is a lightweight Yahoo! widget that provides a fun and interactive software solution for animating your screen activity. It places a small cat on the screen that chases the mouse cursor and leaves footsteps.

The widget sports a clean and straightforward layout that gives users the possibility to set up the dedicated parameters with just a few clicks.

Neko comes packed with several configuration settings of its own that allow you to make the cat follow the mouse cursor or let it walk freely, and go to sleep if the mouse is idle.

What’s more, you can select the speed, choose from different skins, as well as make the cat disappear when you click on the icon. Plus, users are allowed to set the running, sleeping, and scratching modes, and display or hide the footsteps.

Neko also displays a pedometer on the screen that reveals information about the total distance, and lets you select the measurement unit.

Other options offered by the Yahoo! environment give you the possibility to prevent the window from being dragged, set the opacity level, and ignore mouse events. You can also make the program stay on top of other applications, and this proves to pretty useful, especially when dealing with multiple tools at the same time.

During our testing we have noticed that the widget offers good image quality and no errors showed up throughout the entire process.

As it would be expected from such a small utility, it manages to remain light on the system resources, so it doesn’t burden the overall performance of the computer, nor interfere with other programs’ functionality.

To sum things up, Neko proves to be a simple desktop enhancement utility. It can be easily configured and installed by all types of users, regardless of their experience level.