Dancer for Pock

A nostalgic Microsoft Dancer for your Touch Bar: a Pock widget that plays the classic dancer animations. Pick which dancer you want from a dropdown in Pock's Widgets Manager. One dancer plays at a time; running several animations at once made some of them freeze.

This repo contains no dancer artwork. You supply the original files yourself and a script converts them locally, in the same spirit as Tale of Two Wastelands.

Requirements

• A Touch Bar Mac (this build targets Intel / x86_64) with Pock 0.9.0 installed in /Applications
• Xcode command line tools (xcode-select --install), and ffmpeg (brew install ffmpeg)

Get the dancers

• Scooby Doo (the free trial): https://archive.org/details/scooby_dancerle. You need ScoobyDoo_L.Dnc.
• The other dancers (Amanda and the rest, from the MSPLUS!DME disc image): https://archive.org/details/msplus-dme Each dancer is a .cab in the disc's folders; the _l ones are the large versions.

Pock versions

This widget is built and tested against Pock 0.9.0, the last release from the original author. The community forks PockV2 and PockV3 aren't supported: PockV3 bundles an older PockKit whose widget API differs from 0.9.0's, and it crashes on launch if any 0.9.0-style widget (this one included) is in ~/Library/Application Support/Pock/Widgets. Don't run PockV3 against the same Widgets folder as 0.9.0.

Install

./convert.sh /path/to/ScoobyDoo_L.Dnc /path/to/Amanda_l.cab   # any mix of .Dnc files, .cab files or folders
./build.sh --install

Pointing convert.sh at a folder converts every dancer in it, preferring the large version of each. Then restart Pock, open the menu bar icon > Customize Pock... and drag Dancer onto the Touch Bar. Choose which dancer plays in Widgets Manager > Dancer.

Dancers live in ~/Library/Application Support/Pock/Dancers, so converting more later needs no rebuild: they appear in the dropdown straight away.

How it works

• A Pock widget is a .pock bundle, not a SwiftPM library. build.sh assembles Dancer.pock with swiftc and ibtool, linking against the PockKit embedded in Pock.app, so no Xcode project is needed.
• convert.sh reads each dancer's video, finds the area they dance in from the .Dat alpha mask (detect_crop.py), and writes frames 60px high: the Touch Bar is 30pt, 60px at 2x. Wider dancers get wider widgets.
• The widget reads frames from disk as they play, so even a seven-minute dancer uses almost no memory.
• The dropdown is Pock's per-widget preferences pane (PKWidgetPreferenceClass in Info.plist), a small compiled nib plus code.

For Apple silicon, the PockKit module and the -target in build.sh would need an arm64 pass.