Eyeballs 3.2 : Eyes for your desktop

Eyeballs is a fun Mac OS X application that gives you a set of eyeballs in your menu bar or on your desktop. The eyes watch the cursor move around as you work. They get sleepy depending on how busy you're keeping the cursor, and they blink periodically. They are extremely configurable, in terms of the colors they use, their eyelid and pupil style, how sleepy they are, and a bunch of other things (see the configuration panel snapshot below). If those configuration options aren't enough, custom skins are also supported! Here are a few examples:


This is a skin called "Aqua Blueberry" that shows a very simple skin design. The eyeballs are living on the desktop in this image.

This is a more unusual skin called "JetBlack", with stylized eyebrows and non-circular pupils.

This beautiful skin called "Anime Lime" is new in Eyeballs 3.2, and shows the ability to clip pupil images to the edges of the eyes, for a very realistic effect.

These skins, called "Eyegor" and "Cobweb", illustrate just how wacky skins can be!


There are more skins built into Eyeballs (including eyes in all five Aqua colors: Blueberry, Strawberry, Grape, Tangerine and Lime), and we expect there to be third-party skins made by Eyeballs users (maybe you!).

If you want to design your own eyeballs, but you're not enough of an artist to draw your own skin, you can make a "personality" by just choosing colors and settings:


This personality, called Kermit, is shown living in the menu bar; skins can be in the menu bar too!

This is Twitch, an overcaffeinated pair of eyeballs if there ever was one! Note the bloodshot corneas! Twitch almost never falls asleep, and his pupils (which are abnormally contracted) quiver slightly all the time.

These eyeballs are an alien personality named Zaphod. There are three eyeballs, of two different sizes, and all three blink independently of each other with an "irising" effect like that of a camera's aperture. The pupils are the "star" style for Zaphod.


This should give you a taste of what Eyeballs is about. All of these settings are user-controllable, so you can make a set of eyeballs to suit your individual needs. Here's a reduced snapshot of the Stick Software-style overengineered preferences panel (click for the full-size snap):

If this seems complicated, there is an online manual to help you out (for a 76K PDF version of this manual that can be used offline, click here). But Eyeballs 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 Eyeballs.

Eyeballs 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 icon for Eyeballs was created by Alexander MacLean of widgetwidget.com. Thanks, Alexander!

The skins in Eyeballs were designed by Max Rudberg of MaxThemes and Kevin Husted of Swizcore Studio. Right now we don't have any third-party downloadable skins, but when we do, we'll link to them here!

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