Shimeji-ee 2.1

Desktop assistants, by all standards, were horribly designed. They took up space on your desktop and gave useless advice and were often in the way far more than they helped. However, it can't be denied that they brought a touch of personality to your computer and many people sorely miss the days when there were a ton of different assistants to choose from. Well, there's a great program that aims to capture the feeling of those programs - Shimeji-ee.

Shimeji-ee is incredibly easy to install. Just unzip it and run the .jar file. As soon as you do that, a little Shimeji will drop onto your screen. It'll wander around and entertain itself. It will occasionally sit down and watch you as you work or climb up the side of your screen to hang out near the top. You can control what it does, of course. You can right-click on the Shimeji at any time to tell it what to do. You can tell it to cycle through its actions, remove it, or add a friend for it to play with.

One of the best parts about this is that you can always download new Shimejis. There are a ton of sprite sheets online that let you change the appearance of them, from Naruto to other less well-known characters that are popular in Japanese culture. 

All in all, if you want a tiny bit of companionship in your long days, then you should give Shimeji-ee a download. It's great at what it does.