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The Palm OS has several Easter
Eggs hidden within it. Easter Eggs are fun little things that programmers
hide in code that they write to be later discovered by the users. Easter
Eggs are usually activated by an obscure Sequence of events that most users
would never actually do. Probably the most famous of these Easter Eggs is
the Taxi that will drive across the screen
at unexpected times. The Taxi Easter Egg was put into the first version of
Palm OS by it's original programmer. The original marketing name of the
first Palm handheld was "Taxi"; however it was discovered at the last
minute that another technology company already had the term "Taxi"
trademarked. The name of the first Palm was changed from "Taxi" to "Pilot"
another name that would prove problematic later on. The Taxi Easter Egg has
remained in every version of Palm OS through Palm OS 5.
To be able to see the Taxi you
must first discover the Preferences Easter Egg. The Preferences Easter
Egg is a small picture of an "Easter Egg" that is displayed in the lower
right-hand corner of the General or Power preferences screen. To activate
the Preferences Easter Egg run the Preferences application and go to the
General screen or the Power screen if you have one. Draw a small
counter-clockwise circle in the lower right corner of the display area. If
done properly, you should see an "Easter Egg".
Once the Preferences Easter Egg
is active you will see the Taxi drive across your screen at somewhat random
times. Waiting to see the Taxi can be a lot like watching water boil. On
some handhelds you can cause the Taxi to appear on demand: Hold the page
down button in any application and draw a line from the middle of the
Graffiti input area to the left edge of the screen between the applications
and the menu silkscreen buttons. On some, but not all handhelds the Taxi
will drive across the screen.
There is now a better way to see
what the Taxi looks like. Taxi! Taxi! is a Palm application that accurately
reproduces the action of the Taxi driving across the screen. Taxi! Taxi!
uses the actual image of the Taxi that is hidden in your handhelds Read Only
Memory (ROM) and animates the Taxi across the screen much like the actual
Taxi Easter Egg does. All you have to do is HotSync the TaxiTaxi.prc file to
your handheld and run it. In a couple of seconds after Taxi! Taxi! is run
you will see a Taxi drive across your screen.
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Example Preferences screen with the Preferences Easter
Egg activated:
Example Taxi Easter Egg driving across the screen:
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