Have you ever had an "Easter egg" in your app? (1 Viewer)

[tmyers]

This came to mind because while I was designing the login system for my app, one of my coworkers (whom ironically is also my boss), said it would really, really funny if when a particular person in the office logs in for the first time to open a web page to a clip from Borat.

Much to my surprise, it was very easily done. So now when said person logs in for the first time, their chosen browser will open to the time stamped skit and it will be hilarious.

Have any of you done something like this? Granted, this is something obviously a professional would never do, but I am clearly not one of those lol.

 

[Isaac]

LOL even professionals must have fun!

Probably the silliest I have ever gotten at work was 1) allowing users to provide pictures to me - their granddaughter, their pet, etc - and using those as icons in a database or programmed excel workbook. 2) programming an app to tell my coworkers "Happy 4th of July" or "Happy Thanksgiving" when the date came. I think I tried birthdays there, too.

Once I programmed something to open a funny webpage or document message when they first logged on - but that for my wife and I was just messing with our home computers - something I used to do a LOT. (I also implemented an idle time logoff complete with saving various open files, on my home computer, once when we had 5 separate windows logins and people would remain logged in forever, which I hated as it ate bandwidth and general memory. The kids hated it. It even had a voice "you are being logged off" - it was hideous and awesome).

The borat thing sounds hilarious!

 

[Minty]

We "Adjusted" a service call system to display various call notes in "Pirate talk" on September 19th, International Talk Like A Pirate Day.

It took quite a lot of work. And only about 5 people noticed.
Call centre staff, who'd have em.

We thought it was hilarious, obviously.

 

[tmyers]

We "Adjusted" a service call system to display various call notes in "Pirate talk" on September 19th, International Talk Like A Pirate Day.

It took quite a lot of work. And only about 5 people noticed.
Call centre staff, who'd have em.

We thought it was hilarious, obviously.

That sounds awesome.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

We had an opportunity to set up a special secondary login for people who had "ticked us off." We had it demand a cookie. But not just any cookie. You had to give it a Macadamia Nut Chocolate Chip cookie. Then you would be able to get it. We did that for a while because people were violating the rules. But then some Navy type said we had to stop that and just add a warning to the user that they had violated a rule and would be reminded of it until they called a particular person (who was on our security staff) who would chew them out, ream them a new one.

That stopped eventually because the person who was violating security rules had the backing of an admiral. That's when we found out that the line from Men In Black is true, paraphrased: "Ma'am, we're from the government. We don't have a sense of humor."

 

[Pat Hartman]

Have you ever had an "Easter egg" in your app?

Not in an app but 40 years ago when I was writing specs for mainframe applications I was designing, I used to put them in the documentation all the time to make sure that people were actually reading and agreeing with my plan rather than just nodding their heads.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

I know people would read some of my documentation when I was describing the range of operations experienced on my particular system. I used the phrase "from feast to famine" regarding the really WIDE range of loads we would see. Someone objected, so I changed it to "from plethora to paucity" and you know they STILL didn't like it. But it WAS a way for me to know they were paying attention.

 

[ByteMyzer]

I wrote an Engineering Change Management application that would allow for integration of various CAD application bill-of-material data with the company's MRP system. For those users who love to double-click everything, including buttons, I incorporated an Easter egg that would, after so many button double-clicks, display a 3-second banner in the middle of the user's screen that said, in big bold letters, "YOU LOVE TO DOUBLE-CLICK, DON'T YOU?" I did catch a few engineers with that one.