Clippy

Yes, Clippy from Microsoft Office is back — on macOS!

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Clippy can be moved around (drag with mouse) and be animated (right-click).

The SpriteKit-Framework is used to animate through Clippy's sprite map.

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First start

1. Download Clippy for macOS or build from source.
2. Run
3. Click 📎 → Show in Finder in the menu bar
4. Unzip all files
5. Click 📎 → Reload
6. Pick an Agent under 📎 → Agents → …

Todos

• Animations (Right-Click → Animate! or press the Space bar)
• Always on top
• Sounds
  • Mute / Unmute
• Transparent when out of focus
• Support for other agents
• Agent picker
• Menu bar Item
• Original size / Zoom
• Actions
  • Hide
  • Show
  • MoveTo x y
  • GestureAt x y
  • Play animation
• Clean up
  • Rewrite the ugly parts (many references and force unwraps)
  • Extract the Agent reader into its own libary
  • Test!
• HitTest on transparent regions
• Support branching and probability
• Idle animations
• Languages
• Control via command line

Demo

Build

git clone https://github.com/Cosmo/Clippy.git

• Open project with Xcode
• Build and run the macOS target

Add other Agents (optional)

An *.acs file includes all required resources (bitmaps, sounds, definitions, etc.) of an agent. Unfortunately, this project does not support *.acs files, yet. But hopefully in the future — pull-requests are welcome.

Until then, you can convert *.acs files with the "MSAgent Decompiler" by Lebeau Software. This software extracts all resources that we need, from an *.acs. There are a few steps involved.

Requirements

brew install imagemagick

Will be used to merge single *.bmp sprites into a single 32 bit PNG-file.

brew install ffmpeg

Will be used to convert *.wav-files in RIFF format to MP3 files.

Conversion

Included in this project is a converter called agent-converter.sh. This tool takes opaque BMP sprites, removes background colors, puts them together to one big transparent PNG file and converts all sounds to MP3.

./agent-convert.sh PATH_TO_AGENT NEW_NAME

AGENT_PATH path to decompiled agent directory. NEW_NAME should only include lowercase letters.

Example

./agent-convert agents/CLIPPIT clippy

Final step

After the conversion step, you will get a new folder called NEW_NAME.agent.

1. Click 📎 → Show in Finder in the menu bar.
2. Move it to the Agents directory.
3. Click 📎 → Reload
4. Select new Agent under 📎 → Agents → …

Attributions

Inspiration was taken from:

• https://github.com/tanathos/ClippyVS (C#)
• https://github.com/smore-inc/clippy.js (JavaScript)

Graphics were created by Microsoft.

Clippy: The Unauthorized Biography

Watch the Unauthorized Biography with Steven Sinofsky, if you're interested in Clippy's history!

Contact

• Devran "Cosmo" Uenal
• Twitter: @maccosmo