Desktop Ponies

Pone entry in progress…

About

Desktop Ponies refers to both an application and the animated sprites which said application uses. When using the application, the sprites, which are mainly characters from the Hasbro franchise My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (MLP: FiM) roam around the screen, occasionally display a message, and can also provide some sort of interactivity – similar to the desktop agents like Bonzi Buddy and the numerous “Virtual Desktop Girls” which were popular in the Early 2000s.

Origin

In April 2011, the fangame “Derpy Delivery” by Grit was uploaded to his now-defunct Hamalonesandwich website, and showcased on fansite Equestria Gaming ^[1]. The original Derpy sprites from this game ^[2] would serve as the basis for the sprites of Desktop Ponies. The Desktop Ponies project began on Ponychan’s /collab/ board later that year, before temporarily moving to its own website, and also spawning a DeviantArt ^[3] group run by the application’s main developers and artists.

Spread

As of this writing, the group’s DeviantArt page has over 248,830 pageviews since it was founded on June 23, 2012 and on Ponychan ^[4] where it began, the people posting about the project managed to fill up 9 threads to their maximum post limit , and are now on their 10th and current thread on the new /fan/ board. Desktop Ponies are released under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license, meaning people cannot charge money or receive it (via donations or voluntary payment) at all in exchange for custom-made Desktop Ponies sprites or anything related to the project.

In the Google Hangouts mobile and desktop application, saying “/ponies” or “/ponystream” resulted in Desktop Ponies running across the screen ^[6]. It is currently unknown when or if this feature has been removed. A similar easter egg was added to YouTube for their Geek Week in August 2013 ^[7].

Notable Examples

As of August 5, 2015, on Derpibooru, the search term “desktop ponies” yields 765 results and 8,084 results on DeviantArt, although some of the results on the latter site are just desktop wallpapers.

Browser Ponies

On May 25, 2012, Desktop Ponies was reimplemented in javascript under the name Browser Ponies ^[5], allowing web developers to embed Desktop Ponies into any site through the site’s code. On any site (that enables iframes) without the Browser Ponies code, they are still viewable on that page by using a bookmarklet (shown below).

Search Interest

External References