Another Easter Egg

A little Friday fun – or another Easter egg.

I’ve written before about how I enjoy putting Easter eggs into products I’ve had a hand in creating.

Then one day, I discovered that my employees enjoyed hiding Easter eggs too. But first things first.

In 2008, when I was running my own software development company, a team of like-minded colleagues and I created DefView, a secure document-viewing system (shown in the first image). The Lenin Library used it to comply with Part IV of the Russian Civil Code across its extensive network of virtual reading rooms.

DefView allowed people in cities across Russia and other countries to visit their nearest library and read documents held in the Lenin Library’s digital collection. Its collection of dissertations and dissertation abstracts was particularly popular.

The network comprised more than 1,500 virtual reading rooms, while DefView was used to view around one million pages and print 200,000 pages every day – enormous figures at the time.

Look closely at the first image and you’ll see DefView’s main application icon in the top-left corner. Nothing remarkable there.

The second image shows the icon at 512×512 pixels. It depicts an open book against a globe. It’s an icon like any other – no better or worse, I suppose.

Sometime around 2010, I noticed that the book in the icon contained some kind of text. The designer had created the original icon as vector artwork, which meant it could be enlarged indefinitely without losing quality. I opened the original and zoomed in far enough to read the text in the book.

You can see the result in the third image.

P.S. I appreciated the designer’s Easter egg. They had taken the trouble to write meaningful text on every line instead of simply drawing a few random strokes.