» Easter Egg Hunt
I recently read a blog post over at the Google Picasa site that made me think of all those “easter eggs” that were embedded in nearly every desktop application of the late 80s, early 90s. Turns out the practice is still alive and rears its head in the most recent version of Picasa. If you use Picasa, try this: press Control-Shift-Y while in Picasa.
I think the practice of allowing easter eggs to exist in code is a bad policy. It complicates the codebase, eats up space (bandwidth, disc, memory), and serves no purpose other than 60-seconds of entertainment for an “egg” that is quickly forgotten. Eggs should never be allowed in production code, IMO.
Do you know of “eggs” on current production software releases? Do you think allowing eggs in production code is a good business policy? Please share.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 11:14 am and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 20th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
http://eggheaven.com/browse/software/
May 20th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Wow… I didn’t realize the extent to which the stupidity has grown. The sickness is rampant. Someone invent a cure, quick!
May 21st, 2008 at 8:14 am
I think they’re great in games, where they also tend to make a lot more sense. As far as business apps and the like, no, it’s pretty dumb. Excel does not need a 3D engine built into it.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:23 am
I could understand easter eggs in non-gaming applications when those programs are in popular competition with other software: e.g. IE, Firefox, Safari, and Opera having easter eggs bashing one another, or Emacs and Vi having something like that.