Consumers thoroughly enjoy using Cortana and what she can bring to the Windows Phone experience and while many are impressed by the whole setup and how Cortana looks on-screen, there may be many hidden animations you may not be aware of. We know Cortana had an Easter egg in the form of Clippy (the famous Word assistant), but Leon Zandman decided to investigate further into how this was triggered and stumbled onto numerous Cortana personae.
Looking at how Windows Phone 8.1 interacted with Bing and Microsoft's cloud services to pull down information to produce to users, Zandman soon discovered that the animation for the Clippy Easter egg had to reside on the phone. Hunting through SDKs, Zandman located Cortana's image resources, which were stored in a handful of DLL files in a system directory on the Windows Phone's main partition. Checking through the resources, he was not only able to find an image for a retired Clippy, but also other personae.
The above image shows but a few of the images available for Cortana to display. It'll be interesting to see what Microsoft intends to do in the future with Cortana and animated responses. For now, be sure to read through Zandman's blog post for all the details. It's well worth checking out.
Source: Leon Zandman; thanks to everyone who tipped us!
