Nyan Cat Progress Bar

What?!

Nyan Cat Progress Bar is an app that displays the Nyan Cat over the top of progress bars in Windows. The best way to describe it is a screenshot:

Why?!

I found a thread on Reddit asking for someone to develop a mod for Windows that replaced progress bars with Nyan Cat. Since Instant Elevator Music does quite a lot of what this hypothetical app would do (ie. it finds progress bars, and plays music), I thought that modifying it to be able to display a Nyan Cat on top of a progress bar would be fairly straight-forward.

Nyan Cat Progress Bar is basically a special release of Instant Elevator Music with many of the features removed (ie. no playlists, changing music, support for splash screens, etc.) but with the addition of the display of the Nyan Cat.

How to use it

Fairly-Important Note: Nyan Cat Progress Bar doesn't work properly on Windows XP (see below for more information). If you're still running XP, you might want to consider upgrading to Windows 7.

Download the Nyan Cat Progress Bar from here
Latest version: 2.1.1.1 (updated 12/7/2011)
SHA-1 hash: 464f4cef5720faa5e1bf4c5698ea6eee6509ea00
Extract the ZIP file to a folder.
Run NyanCatProgressBar.exe
Try copying some files in Windows Explorer. :)

What apps does it work with?

Since the Nyan Cat Progress Bar depends on the progress bar being a standard Windows progress bar (ie. not a custom-drawn one, or a non-native one), it won't work with every progress bar on your system, but I've at least confirmed it works with Windows Explorer for file copies. If you want to hear music while you wait for more apps, try Instant Elevator Music instead: it has support for a lot more apps since it doesn't depend on being able to get the progress from the progress bar you're looking at.

Some apps I've seen it work with are: WinZip, 7-Zip, Audacity, and Windows DVD Maker, but it should work with some other apps too.

How can I turn it off?

There are a few ways you can silence the Nyan Cat:

Right-click the Nyan Cat Progress Bar icon in your system tray (near the clock) and choose Silence! to stop the Nyan Cat from automatically activating.
If you don't want a particular program to activate the Nyan Cat, you can right-click the Nyan Cat Progress Bar icon and choose "Ignore (application name)". You can also add programs to the ignore list in the Settings dialog.
If you don't want Nyan Cat to activate while you're listening to music in either iTunes or Winamp, you can right-click the Nyan Cat Progress Bar icon, choose Settings, and then tick the "Don't show Nyan Cat if I'm listening to music in iTunes or Winamp" checkbox.

Where is the music / animation from?

The music is by daniWellP: http://aidn.papiness.com
The animation is by prguitarman: http://www.prguitarman.com/index.php?id=348

I'd like to hope that this usage of both of these pieces of media is covered by the Fair Use (or similar) provisions of your local copyright laws, but if you're a copyright holder and you're unhappy with my usage, please email me a Cease and Desist and I'll take it down.

Can you make it work with <program name>?

Probably not. Nyan Cat Progress Bar takes advantage of standard Windows progress bars and their ability to respond to messages that let other apps query the value of the progress bar. If your app doesn't work with it, then it's not responding to these messages, so it's probably not a standard progress bar.

Why does it crash as soon as I open it?

Make sure you unzip the archive into a folder first, so it can find the DLL files that come with it.

Hey, I ran it and it plays the music but doesn't show Nyan Cat? What gives?

The Nyan Cat will only show itself when the program with the progress bar is the foreground window. So, if you don't see the Nyan Cat, try clicking on the window that has the progress bar.

Y U NO WORK WITH WINDOWS XP?

It seems to be a bug in the animation code. Sometimes on Windows XP it will draw the Nyan Cat with a big blue box around it. However, for some people it works absolutely fine on Windows XP, so your mileage may vary.

How do I uninstall it?

There is no uninstaller for Nyan Cat Progress Bar: all you have to do is exit the program (right-click the Nyan Cat icon and choose Exit), and then delete the Nyan Cat Progress Bar files. It doesn't install itself to anywhere else on the system.

If you set the Nyan Cat Progress Bar to run at startup, and you delete it, you might get an error next time you log in to Windows. You can fix this by:

Clicking on the Start button
Copying and pasting the following text into the Search box (without the quotation marks):
"reg delete HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run /v NyanCatProgressBar"
and pressing Enter.
Type Yes when prompted.

I have another question...

Please email me here, or tweet at me here.