What is an Easter Egg? An Easter Egg, in computer terms is speaking about a feature, about box, or picture hidden in a program, control panel, accessory, or even the operating system. Finding them is reminicent of an Easter Egg hunt when you were a child. Some of them are easy to spot, while others are impossible unless you know exactly how and where to look.
Many can be found while trying different key combinations while selecting "About This Program" from the Apple Menu. Others may be found while trying key combinations and selecting different features buttons and options in a program.
There are many resources for these little gremlins. Programmers hide them in their work to grab a little credit, glory or sometimes just to have a little fun and break up the monotony of a sometimes intense job. A search on Yahoo or Lycos or one of any number of search engines will net you many home pages dealing with Easter Eggs.
Here are a few I and others have found just puttering around in different programs.

Adobe Illustrator®5.5:Holding down your Command and option keys while selecting "About Illustrator" adds this secret message to the about box. Waiting a little while produces a scrolling effect. Hold down your option key to quicken scrolling. In Illustrator 6.0 the message reads R.I.P Popeye 1994-95.
And if you think that's cool, there are alternate selections in the selection box in the lower left hand corner. Option clicking the selection box gives you seven more selections. Peter's home number, I surmise, is the home phone number of Peter Merrill, one of the managers of the project. Verion 6.0 has Doug Olson's home phone number. Turn about is fair play. The next item results in a pair of googly eyes that watch the cursor wherever it goes. Moon Phases shows you what the current phase of the moon is,  perfect for the werewolf wannabe. Mouse clicks gives the count of mouse clicks since the start of this session of using Illustrator. The National Debt gives you a running count of the National Debt updated every second (very sobering). Random number generates lots of 2 digit random numbers. Shopping days till Christmas reminds us of one of the many reasons we work on our Macs.

Adobe Photoshop® 3.0x: The option  key plus "About Photoshop" from the Apple Menu displays Knoll Software's About box. Thomas and John Knoll were the originators of Photoshop and licensed it to Adobe in 1988. In February 1990 Adobe Photoshop 1.0 shipped!

Adobe Photoshop® 3.0x: Command  plus "About Photoshop" from the Apple Menu displays Tiger Mountain About Box. I don't know what this means, but possibly it may have been the code name for the Photoshop project. If anyone knows for sure please E-mail me.

Adobe Photoshop® 3.0x: Cool Messages: After the credits scroll through at least once, click on the Adobe logo to reveal messages in the top of the splash screen. Many quotes are from movies and tv shows. Others are just plain funny. They seem to go on endlessly.

 Adobe Photoshop® 4.0x: Big Electric Cat. Could this be the cat from "Christmas Vacation"? Hitting your Command key plus About Photoshop from the Apple Menu gives you the official mascot of the Photoshop 4.0 project. Command click his nose for an added surprise! If you hit your option key the credits will scroll faster. Your name will appear in the credits if you placed your name in the registration fill-out box. In addition, if you click on the Adobe Logo and you have Netscape open you will be whisked to a file with Photoshop links located in the Photoshop folder. Also, with option key pressed, wait for all the credits to finish scrolling. Option-click below and to the right of the Adobe Logo for 'witticisms'.

Adobe Photoshop® CS: Dark Matter. Press command+option and choose About Photoshop for this one. Press option key to scroll credits faster.

 Adobe Photoshop® 5.xx: Strange Cargo. The Electric cat is pictured on the top of the floating cargo box. Hitting your Command key plus About Photoshop from the Apple Menu gives you this alternate splash screen. When you see this screen type the word "burp" to hear the secret sound. Three guesses as to what it is... Let the credits scroll through or hit your option key to get them to scroll faster. When they reach the end, option click in the white area just above the credits to start some secret messages.

Adobe Photoshop® 6.xx: Venus in furs. Press command > about from apple menu = Venus in Furs with scrolling credits that are funny. Thanks to Rick Daugherty.

Adobe Photoshop® 7.xx: Liquid Sky Beta Screen. Press command+option and choose About Photoshop for this one. Press option key to scroll credits faster.

 Adobe Photoshop® 3.0x-CS: Friendly Wizard. With the layers pallette showing, click the triangle menu to the right and press the option button while choosing "Palette options"

QuarkXpress® 3 and 4: The Little Martian guy! Pressing the Command, Option, Shift and K keys all at the same time with an object selected causes a little Martian to walk across your screen and zap (delete) the selected object. Complete with sound effects!

QuarkXpress® 4 and 5: New with 4, press the key combo 5 times and see the monster take care of the martian too! Make sure you have 5 items to zap. Thanks to C. Simon for that neat egg!

QuarkXpress® 6: The little Martian guy will still zap your objects, but I was unable to get the monster to take care of him. Oh well!

 ADOBE GOLIVE 4.0: ROTATING DEVELOPERS. With your caps lock key down press option-command and choose About Adobe Golive from the Apple menu. You will get a movie featuring the development team

 Stickies: The Mysterious Moose. Type in the word "Antler!" to see the secret moose. This is the logo of the company that originally came up with the idea of the stickies program. Apple subsequently purchased the software for their use as a system gizmo. Doesn't work in OSX

 QuarkXpress® 3 and 4:Pressing the option key while selecting "About QuarkXpress®" from the Apple Menu gives you the environment box, which tells you which Xtensions you're running, serial numbers and version numbers of all software involved. Pressing Command Option Shift and clicking in the environment box results in a secret picture of some of the development team. Quark 4 shows a whole array of peiple involved in the process.

 Retrospect 4.0 Option-click the Credits tab within About Retrospect. It gives a short story and picture of Balto the sled dog and why Dantz chose Balto as the code name for Retrospect 4.0

Retrospect 4.1: Option click the credits tab and you get a picture from a very old reader. (I seem to remember this one.)

Script Editor: Holding down the Command, Option, and Control keys while clicking on the Icon in the About AppleScript box nets you a weird message! In earlier versions you'll get a Pure Guava message.

Script Editor: Holding down the Command, Option, and Control keys while clicking on the Icon in the About Script Editor box yields the whole message.

Well, that's all I have for you right now. I'm always looking for new Easter eggs. If you've got some that aren't listed here or if you run across some interesting ones, please E-mail us with any Easter Eggs you find! email us