Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at some hidden Easter eggs on your Mac.
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So Easter eggs, of course, are hidden little fun things in software and operating systems
that really don't do anything but they are just neat to know they are there. It shows
that there is somebody else with a good sense of fun on the other end building these things
for us. Now gone are the days where there was a hidden game of Breakout in macOS and eMax
was installed so you could run it in Terminal and access all the Easter eggs in eMax. A lot
of the old Easter eggs are gone. But there are a bunch of hidden things even in macOS Ventura.
First let's take a look at what happens when you download a large file and have to wait for it to
download. What's the date on that file before it is actually complete. Well, let's try it here with
this file. I'm going to download the linked file and I'm going to Save it in my Downloads folder.
Then I'm going to look in my Downloads folder and you can see the download is progressing.
If I select it while the download is in progress and use Command i, I see that the credit date is
January 24, 1984. This will be the created date for any file you're in the middle of downloading.
That's the date of the original presentation where Steve Jobs announced the Macintosh.
Now let's go into System Settings and then down to Users & Groups.
Then if you change the icon that you use for the User you can go to Suggestions and you'll
recognize some of these. They have been around for a long time. They are little standard icons that
you can use. One of them is of a vinyl record right here. Now it is hard to see here but we
can locate this file in the system. If you're in the Finder and you do Go, to the Computer Level,
then to your Drive, then to Library and then down to User Pictures, this one is under Instruments
and it's Turntable. If we double click to open this up it will open up on Preview. We can zoom in
and see the names of the songs on this record. These are all words that Steve Jobs like to use.
Magic, Revolution, Boom, Unbelievable, and then there is a little Made in California
and an Apple logo. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple and introduced the iMac there was a whole
new advertising campaign called Think Different and had this speech, that you probably know as
the Crazy Ones. That used to be in the TextEdit icon. But it is not there anymore. As a matter
of fact it used to be in several different places. But you can still find it in a few.
If you go to System Settings and then go down to Displays you could see the icons here for
showing you how text will look at different resolutions includes the text for the Crazy
Ones. But you can also find this hidden in an emoji character. If you use Control Command
Space or fn and E and you search for Book you come up with several here. But there is one that
you can see has some text on it. Let's choose that one. It will gives you this little book
character. Take that one and make it as large as you can. If you look closely you can see
it says Here's to the Crazy Ones and it's got the beginning of that little piece of ad copy.
Now the thing about emoji characters are there's an international board called the
Unicode Consortium that decides which new emoji characters get added so that everybody is on
the same page. Apple, Microsoft, Goggle, and all sorts of different companies that use different
emoji characters. But each company is in charge of creating the art work for its own version of
that. That's why the little book icon there has that text on it but it is only on Apple
devices. You're not going to find that text say on the Microsoft or Goggle version of the book.
Another one where Apple has inserted a little Easter egg in their version
is if you look for coin and insert the coin character and then you'll see here the Crazy
Ones and it's got the year 2020 which is the year that Apple designed this emoji.
Now the Emoji & Special Character viewer has an Easter egg of its
own. If you bring that up and you search for the word Clarus
you get a dog and a cow. Actually if you search for moof you get a dog and a cow too. What do dogs
and cows have in common with those words. Well go to the Wikipedia page for dogcow and you'll
find a little history of this special symbol named DogCow or Clarus but there is a lot to read about
Clarus the dogcow in Apple history here and you may recognize it because if you had an old Mac,
back in the 80's or 90's, if you went to Page Setup this was the image that was used to show
you the orientation of the page that you were going to print. Most people just saw
it there and never really thought much about it. But it actually is quite an interesting read here.
But it's not the only place you'll see Clarus the dogcow because after a long time of not
being anywhere in macOS, in macOS Ventura Clarus the dogcow is back. If you go to
an app that has File, Page Setup, not just Print but has to have Page Setup
then you can use Page Setup and there it is. It's back again with a slightly new design.
Now a lot of Apple icons used to have Easter eggs. There was the TextEdit icon,
the Mail icon had some interesting stuff on it. Lot of other little things as well.
But most of those are gone. One that still has a kind of neat Easter egg is a fairly
new icon and that's the one of Voice Memos. If you look at that icon there you'll see a wave
form. What's that waveform. Well, that the waveform you get if you say the word Apple.
There's another icon that has a special Easter egg on it and I'm going to use Shift
Command G and then go to this path here. Going into System Library, Core Services,
CoreTypes dot bundle, Contents Resources. You're going to get to a Directory that
has all sorts of icons for different things. Like, for instance, it's got icons for all
these different Mac computers here and other devices that maybe hooked up to your network.
But what if you're not hooked up to a Mac. What if your network has a PC on it. Well,
then it is going to use this icon here. The public generic PC icon. What does that one
look like? Well, it looks like a really old CRT Screen and what's on it? The Blue
Screen of Death. The windows aroscreen that you would get when windows crashes.
Now back in Safari let's say I wanted to read this Wikipedia page about Dogcow. Again one thing I may
want to do is go to Bookmarks and say, Add To My Reading List. Now when I want to see my reading
list I go to View and then Show Sidebar. In the Sidebar here I have different modes,
like tabs at the top and some modes down here, Bookmarks, Reading List, Shared With You,
and iCloud Tabs. Reading List has an icon. The icon for Reading List is a pair of glasses. But
if you look at the style of glasses you notice that they are Steve Jobs' glasses.
Now back in the Finder let's use Shift Command G to go to another location. This time in System
Library, Image Capture, Devices and then Virtual Scanner dot app Contents and Resources. Go in
there. You're met with a bunch of files that have to do with Image Capture. All these files
look pretty normal except there are two odd ones in here. One is a simpledoc.pdf. It is a pdf here
that has a bitcoin white paper. What's that doing there? Well, no-one really knows for sure but it
has been around since around 2018. Most likely it was just a convenient document that happens
to be completely open without copyright. So it is probably used for some utility in the app as
a sample pdf. But a little stranger than that is a cover dot jpeg image that is a picture of this
which people have traced to a spot on Treasure Island in San Francisco. No one really knows why
it is included as an image there. But if you ever need a sample image and you've got nothing else on
your Mac you can always, I guess, use this to play around with in Preview or other graphic's apps.
So I always say hope you found this useful but not
this time because none of this stuff is useful. It is just fun.