For Your Programmer’s Arsenal: A Working Clippy For Any Web Page

John Biggs

Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... → Learn More

Tuesday, May 29th, 2012
Screen Shot 2012-05-29 at 5.28.06 PM

You’re hitting deadline and you want to add that special something that will totally knock your web app out of the park. Do you add rounded corners? A Tweet This button? No, motherlover, you add Clippy JS.

Clippy JS, made by Smore, is a cute little bit of Javascript code that allows you to embed Clippy, Merlin, Rover, or Links (all of Microsoft Office fame) into any webpage. You can make these folks do all kinds of things including look around, jump up and down, and even converse with your users. Why? Because it’s funny, that’s why.

You can download the code here and it requires just a little bit of Javascript in the header and footer to get the thing rolling. You can stack actions and even programmatically control Clippy to ask questions.

This is obviously just a bit of fun, but I could see a day when Clippy is helping us fill out web forms almost everywhere. Imagine a Clippy helping you on Paypal.com (“I see you’re trying to launder money. Can I help?), phishing Clippy (“Please enter my friend your PINcode?”), and even NSFW Clippy (“I see you like… oh my god, what is that? Why are you making me see that?”) The possibilities are, as they say, endless.

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