Easter Every Day on the Pilot

Every PDA seems to have some hidden feature put in by the developers to keep us entertained searching for them. The best of the kind is the Doonesbury cartoon hidden inside the Newton 2.0 OS. Strangely enough, I haven't (yet!) seen any reports of Easter Eggs for Windows CE. So far there have been five Easter Eggs reported for the Pilot, most of these in the Giraffe application.

Start up Giraffe, press the style in the middle of the title bar, and press the page down button. The Pilot screen clears to show the text message: Not ready reading drive C Abort, Retry, Fail?. This message will stay over a power off, until you press the stylus on the screen to clear it.

Has this Pilot crash landed?

For another Easter Egg, still in Grafitti, call up the Grafitti help screen and enter the Grafitti strokes for a # (this is a dot followed by a backwards N - look it up in the help screen!). You will see a brief animation of a palm tree swaying in the breeze.

the Palm Pilot

The final Easter Egg in Grafitti is a more mystifying one: press the stylus to the bottom right corner of the display area (above the silk screen buttons), and press page up. The result is a grubby black and white image of two men (presumably) in tuxedos.

Developers never used to look like this

For a simple list of developers names, start the Memory application, press the stylus in the title bar, and press page down. a credits list will slowly drop down from the title bar, one name at a time.

The last Easter Egg is the most difficult one of all; I haven't been able to reproduce it. Some people have reported seeing a small car trundle across the screen, and this is known as the Taxi Easter Egg. Apparently this is timer related, and is most likely to happen if you leave the system in the Memo application for a length of time. Another way of reproducing the Easter Egg is apparently as follows: set the date to January 31 and start a new memo. Hold down the page down button, and draw a line from the centre of the screen to the extreme left hand edge. One word of warning: when you reset the date to the current date after trying this, you will have to dismiss the warning panel for each of your reminders, one at a time.

Words and design by:
Paul Lynch
Last updated: July 30, 1997