Hidden in Tuesday’s invite to the Apple September event is an augmented reality Easter egg. It’s part of the company’s ongoing move to draw more attention to AR — and make its event invites cooler than anyone else’s.
The graphic for the event is the Apple logo floating over a lake in the evening. iPhone users can transfer that design to the real 3D world, and pass through it into a star-lit virtual space.
Intrepid explorers online on Reddit and YouTube have come across an especially fun Easter egg in Google’s iOS app — a secret pinball game that takes a little doing to find.
Hidden in Tuesday’s invite to the September Apple event is a clue that might confirm rumors that the company will make a major push into augmented reality.
The graphic for the invite is an apple sketched out with blue swirls. iPhone and iPad users can put that design in motion, with it seemingly appearing in the real world.
If you’re an Apple fan of a certain age, you may well remember the way the company (or, rather, its more enterprising engineers) used to pack the code of new Apple products with hidden Easter Eggs.
A practice that has largely been absent since the early 2000s, this allowed employees to find inventive ways of getting themselves credited on software they had worked on. An entertaining recent talk by Swift coder and former Apple employee James Thompson relives its history:
Speedtest is a useful iOS application that shows users how fast their network connection is. Its latest update is more about fun than Internet speeds, though. It’s a humorous homage to the company’s namesake, Ookla the cat.
Surely you’ve said to yourself, “My Mac desktop is messy, but it could be messier.” No? Well, someone at Apple has, and built a tool into the macOS Mojave beta to disorganize everything on your desktop.
This easter egg is almost certainly a feature needed during testing, but it’s also a sign that the Apple developers are willing to have a bit of fun.
If you have young children, the last question you want to hear on any long journey is, “Are we there yet?” It’s never asked just once; it’s asked again and again and again until you angrily threaten to turn around and go home, or you plow into a tree.
The question is so infuriating that even Google Maps can’t take it. Ask the maddening question a few times while navigating and you’ll get the angry response you deserve.
Apple is known for placing its fair share of Easter eggs into iOS and OS X, but this is the coolest one we’ve seen in a while.
You know the new Voice Memos icon Apple introduced in iOS 7 Beta 2? It turns out the icon is designed after the waveform representation of someone saying “Apple.”
One of the most famous speeches by Steve Jobs is the commencement address he gave at Stanford University in 2005. The 22-minute speech is definitely worth watching if you’re an Apple fan.
Apple has made small and subtle references to Jobs in its software before, and now another easter egg has been discovered in Pages for Mac. Jobs’ entire commencement speech is hidden within a text file in Pages, and it’s easy to pull up.
Depending on the way you ask Siri for the date of Father’s Day this year, she might give you two completely different answers. A redditor discovered that when you ask Siri, ‘Is Father’s Day this weekend?’ the personal assistant erroneously replies that “Father’s Day is on Friday, June 14th,” even though it most definitely is not.
To make matters more embarrassing Siri answers the questions correctly if you phrase it as “When’s Father’s Day?” On the bright side of things though, you now have an excuse if you forget to buy dad something in time.
Siri knows everything(kind of). She even knows when you’re trying to use the Konami Code to cheat your way towards world domination.
In a newly discovered Siri Easter egg, if you try to give Siri the Konami Code (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start), she’ll chide you for your cheating ways.
Here are two other responses you can get in the Easter egg:
Sometimes when you can’t decide between two things the easiest thing to do is flip a coin. Don’t got a quarter? Well, Siri can now create some random numbers for you via the command “Roll the dice.”
The litter Easter egg might also come in handy if you’re Monopoly board is missing its shiny white dice. But then again, you’ll probably be playing a game on your iPhone by then.
Oh, and if you just want Siri to flip a coin instead, she can do that too:
Apple loves to hide little surprises, or “easter eggs,” within its software — such as the memorable quotes inside its OS X icons, or the temporary date (Jan 24, 1984 — when the first Macintosh was unveiled) given to apps downloaded from the Mac App Store. A new one has been discovered that’s sure to please Lord of the Rings fans.
Typing a simple comment into Terminal reveals a Lord of the Rings timeline that Apple has hidden in OS X. Here’s how to access it.
An old-as-the-hills Easter Egg has been rediscovered by New York based hacker collective NYC Resistor: hidden pictures of the Macintosh team from 1986 hidden in the Mac SE’s system ROM. The Easter Egg has been known about forever — references to it on the Internet go back to at least 1999 — but more interesting than the Easter Egg itself is how NYC Resistor discovered for themselves how it was done: by good, old fashioned hacking.
If you’ve ever had the pleasure of inserting an old floppy of Jordan Mechner’s classic beat-em-up Karateka into a vintage Apple II, you already know it’s one of the most timelessly classic video ames ever made.
Ever tried inserting the floppy disk upside down, though? If you’re one of the few people who have, whether by accident or design, you’ve experienced one of the greatest and funniest Apple easter eggs of all time: the whole game played upside down.
Watching the new WWDC 2012 developer video “Introducing Passbook, Part 1,” we couldn’t help but notice that about three minutes in, one of the example passes Apple uses to show off Passbook’s functionality is for a ticket on Oceanic Flight 815 from Sydney to Los Angeles.
If that fictional airline sounds familiar, it should: that’s the same airline and flight as the one which kicks off the events in the hit ABC television series, Lost.
Using that ticket in real life would see you stranded on a mysterious, time-shifting tropical island in the middle of nowhere, where you would have to wrestle with rampaging polar bears, sexy ladies, malevolent insect swarms and an enragingly stupid sixth season that basically boils all of the mysteries down to “a wizard did it.”
Google is well known for their awesome Easter Eggs and today’s will have you Starcraft faithful Zerging in your pants. If you do a Google search for “Zerg Rush” you’ll soon find yourself defending your page against the ravaging appetites of ominous Os. It’s a fun and geeky reference to the overwhelming scale of attack carried out by the mass-producing “Zerg” race from the popular RTS game Starcraft.
We’ve mentioned before that TextEdit’s icon under OS X has Apple’s entire “Think Different” essay written on it, if you blow it up big enough.But this one’s new to us: it also appears in its majority on Lion’s new All My Files icon.
Here’s to the crazy ones indeed… crazy to write an entire essay on an icon meant to be rendered in less than 80 pixels squared. Very cool.
There’s an easter egg in iOS 5: a new panorama mode that lets you stitch together multiple shots you take with your iPhone’s camera into a gorgeous 180+ degree image. Unfortunately, while Apple clearly spent some time putting this together, there’s no way to access it as a consumer unless you jailbreak your iPhone. Here’s how to get Apple’s panorama mode working on your iPhone 4, iPhone 4S or iPad 2.
Reader Pascal Beausoleil pointed us to a cool (and, we think, new) easter egg in OS X Lion.
If you go to System Preferences > Users you can change your OS X default user icon to a vinyl record… but what are the track titles on that record? If you like Steve Jobs’ keynotes and his unique, shouted catchphrases, you’ll absolutely love this…