LITTLE STAR — WINDOWS DESKTOP PREVIEW

This is an independent local preview, not a paid subscription activation.
Planned subscription: USD 20/year. Production payment and entitlement checks
must be connected by the publishing owner before the product is sold.

RUN
1. Use the Little Star web maker to try the fictional demo or choose a photo,
   then write ten messages. Use only images you are allowed to use.
   This app does not infer age or identity.
2. Export the .littlestar.json companion file.
3. Run LittleStar.exe. On first use, when no companion is saved, the Little
   Star setup window has a taskbar entry. Click Choose companion file and
   select the .littlestar.json file you exported. Canceling the file picker
   returns to setup. Click Cancel in setup, press Esc there, or close that
   setup window to quit without creating the default LittleStar data folder.
   You can also drag your companion file onto LittleStar.exe, or pass its
   path as the first command-line argument. Later launches use the locally
   saved companion instead of showing setup.
4. Double-click your desktop companion to see the next message immediately.
   Right-click it, or use its Windows tray icon, for pause, mute, gentle
   wandering, automatic/reading/sleeping activities, import, and quit.

BEHAVIOR
The default interval is three hours; the maker supports 2, 3, 4 or 6 hours.
The ten authored messages are delivered in order and wrap from 10 back to 1.
The next message and due time persist locally across restarts.
After computer sleep, at most one overdue message is shown; missed intervals
are not replayed in a burst. Quiet hours defer automatic reminders until their
end, show the sleeping activity, and suppress voice including manual previews.
Entering quiet hours cancels an in-progress utterance. Windows sleep and
session-lock events stop voice and animation; resume/unlock checks one due
message without consuming messages while the session is locked.
Pause holds the remaining reminder time. A manual message reschedules the next
reminder and consumes the next item in the same ten-message sequence.
Everyday activities automatically change every 35–90 seconds. Older one-row
animation files remain supported and fall back to their idle frames.

VOICE AND PRIVACY
Speech uses an installed local Windows voice matching English or Chinese.
It does not clone a photo subject's voice. If a matching local voice is absent,
messages still appear in the speech bubble. Audio requires voiceEnabled in the
companion file, an available voice, no quiet hours, no pause and no mute.
The executable has no network, telemetry, account, payment, or upload code.
The selected animation, ten messages and reminder state are saved to the
current Windows user's LocalAppData\LittleStar folder. Quit the app and remove
that folder yourself if you want to erase its local copy.
The event log records event kind, time and sequence index, not message text.
No startup registration, background service or file association is installed.
Reminders stop when the app is closed or the computer is off.

REQUIREMENTS
Windows desktop with .NET Framework 4.8 and System.Speech. These were present
on the development machine. Other Windows versions/voices are not certified.
This preview EXE is unsigned. No installer or system setting is changed.
Mac and Linux executables are not included.

BUILD (source checkout only)
The preview ZIP contains only LittleStar.exe and this README.
Run build.ps1 from the desktop source checkout. It uses the existing Windows .NET Framework C#
compiler and local framework assemblies; no package download is required.

INDEPENDENT TEST COMMANDS
LittleStar.exe --self-test --self-test-report "C:\absolute\test-results.json"
LittleStar.exe --validate-config "C:\absolute\sample.littlestar.json" --self-test-report "C:\absolute\validation.json"
LittleStar.exe "C:\absolute\sample.littlestar.json" --data-dir "C:\absolute\isolated-test-data" --qa-interval-seconds 15
LittleStar.exe "C:\absolute\sample.littlestar.json" --data-dir "C:\absolute\isolated-visible-qa" --qa-interval-seconds 15 --qa-visible-window

--qa-interval-seconds is a clearly marked command-line test mode, never exported
by the web maker. The supported range is 5–300 seconds. Use an isolated
--data-dir for testing so actual customer data is not changed.
--qa-visible-window is another command-line-only observation flag. It adds a
taskbar entry and permits normal window activation so native UI inspection can
select the transparent window, titled "Little Star · QA visible preview".
It retains layered transparency, always-on-top rendering and the same reminder
scheduler. Without this flag, ordinary preview behavior remains a tool window
without a taskbar entry or activation. The JSON maker cannot enable this flag.

Validation limits: exact 10 messages, 1–240 visible characters each; 40-character
name; fixed 256×320 frames, 12 columns and 1 or 3 rows; local embedded PNG only;
compressed PNG at most 8 MiB; JSON file at most 12,500,000 bytes; bounded frames.
No external image URL, executable path or script is loaded from companion data.

The scheduler and parser self-tests do not constitute visual, speech listening,
physical sleep/resume, multi-monitor or production subscription acceptance.
