Easter eggs

Read Cult of Mac’s latest posts on Easter eggs:

How to see the AR Easter egg hidden in Apple’s September 14 event invite

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How to see the AR Easter egg in Apple’s September 14 event invite
The Apple September event invite has a beautiful but hidden augmented-reality feature.
Photo: Ed Hardy/Cult of Mac

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.

How to see the AR easter egg hidden in Apple’s Sept. 15 event invite

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Augmented reality could play a part in the September Apple Event
The logo for the September Apple Event is more than just a simple graphic. It’s an AR object.
Photo: Ed Hardy/Cult of Mac

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.

This Apple Store Easter egg is popping!

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The Apple Store app hit a milestone
The Apple Store app hit double digits, and you can join in the party.
Photo: Ed Hardy/Cult of Mac

The Apple Store app debuted 10 years ago, and laid an Easter egg to recognize this milestone.

Type in the right words and you can join the celebration with balloons.

Check out this entertaining history of Easter Eggs in Apple products

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Easter Eggs
Take a walk through Easter Egg history.
Photo: Pamela Carls/Flickr CC

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:

macOS Mojave easter egg scrambles your desktop with a single click

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macOS Mojave Mess Up easter egg
I swear, we didn't make this up. There really is a "Mess Up" feature in macOS Mojave.
Photo: Ian Fuchs/Cult of Mac

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.

Google Maps loses its cool when asked, ‘Are we there yet?’

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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.

Awesome iOS Easter egg discovered after two years, hiding in plain sight

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Say Apple into Voice Memos and you get its logo. Photo: Mike Rundle
Say "Apple" into Voice Memos and you get its logo. Photo: Mike Rundle

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.”

Steve Jobs’ inspirational commencement speech is hidden in Pages for Mac

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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.

Do Not Trust Siri To Remember Father’s Day This Year [Image]

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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.

Source: Reddit

Siri Knows You’re A Dirty Cheater At Video Games [Easter Egg]

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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: 

May The Odds Be Ever In Your Favor With Siri Dice Rolling Easter Egg

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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:

siri-flip-coin

 

One Easter Egg To Rule Them All: Apple Hides Lord Of The Rings Timeline In OS X

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The smallest Mac in Mordor.
The smallest Mac in Mordor.

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.

Ghosts In The ROM: Hacking Into A 25 Year Old Macintosh Easter Egg

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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.

The Greatest Easter Egg Of All Time Was Exclusive To The Apple II

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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.

Apple Places Easter Egg For LOST Fans In iOS 6 Passbook Developer Video

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On the left, a ticket in iOS 6's new app, Passport. On the right, the horrific plane crash from Lost. Both are the same flight.
On the left, a ticket in iOS 6's new app, Passport. On the right, the horrific plane crash from Lost. Both are the same flight.

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.”

Source: developer.apple.com (Developer account required)
Thanks: Alex M!

Google Fun: Get Your Defenses Ready And Then Do A Search For Zerg Rush

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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.

“Here’s To The Crazy Ones” Is Hidden On OS X Lion’s New ‘All My Files’ Icon

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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.

[via Finer Things In Mac]

Secret iOS 5 Easter Egg Lets You Take Panorama Photos [How-To]

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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.

Check Out This Awesome Steve Jobs Easter Egg Apple Sneaked Into OS X Lion!

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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…