What do easter eggs have to do with Palms? I hear you ask. If you are thinking of the decorated kind with yolks, not much. But computer folks have long been calling hidden product features easter eggs because they are undocumented and you need to search for them within applications much like you need to hunt for the hidden eggs at Easter (or the Afikomen during a Passover seder).
Before we get started, we need to know more about hunting for easter eggs:
The most common type of easter egg involves crediting the people who designed, programmed, or tested the application. Cute graphics are also popular easter eggs, especially graphics that tie into the theme of the application or the name of the author or company producing it.
Easter eggs can also add additional undocumented functionality to an application. This type of easter egg allows the developer to provide certain people access to special functionality or to provide advanced game levels or modes. These features are almost always unsupported.
Easter eggs are completely reproducible. Performing the same tasks in the same application on any unit with the same specs should lead to the same event. They are not meant to harm the application or your Palm in any way - if something bad happens you probably found a bug not an easter egg.
Searching for easter eggs can be great fun, but it can also be frustrating. Easter eggs are usually launched by a very precise multi-item series of actions. Two of the more common methods of launching easter eggs are tapping on a very specific spot on the screen while holding a specific key and making a particular unusual grafitti stroke such as dragging the stylus from the center of the graffiti area to the area of the main screen just above the applications silkscreen button.
It seems like looking for easter eggs is about as easy as looking for a needle in a haystack, especially since there may not actually be any in the application you are exploring. However, there are ways to improve your chances of finding an easter egg. It helps to know that a specific application actually has one or more easter eggs. Many developers will tell you their applications have easter eggs but not how to access them. You can also examine the Palm files on your desktop system and see if anything stands out. Try opening them in a text editor and see if any text you don't see from the normal menus or usage is visible in the editor or if anything else sticks out (thanks to Josh Forman for this hint).
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