Parallels Desktop: the whole truth about eggs
In this post we want to declassify Easter eggs, created in the entire history of Parallels Desktop for Mac, and tell about the reasons for their creation. Easter Eggs - Easter eggs, comic functionality that many developers have been incorporating into their products for over 30 years. Usually they do it simply “for fun” - especially if the joke in the software does not require much time for development. And if you have to work hard to sell eggs (as in our case)? Why waste resources on developing such functionality in a commercial product that does not add value to it?
So that you immediately find the “egg”: in the latest versions, “Easter egg” is in the same place. Top menu -> Parallels Desktop -> About Parallels Desktop . The opening window with information about the installed version is illustrated with a Mac image with a large black button in the middle. Click on it.
Why do we do this?
About the ideologist of Easter eggs Parallels Desktop for Mac
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The inspirer of the creation of all Easter eggs, starting from the earliest versions, was Alexander Grechishkin, the head of the development of Parallels Desktop for Mac. By the way, he is firmly convinced that Easter eggs are a hobby that should not be directly related to the product. Therefore, they never stand in terms of work and everything is done exclusively outside working hours. Of course, sometimes top management wonders if the Easter eggs will be in the new version, but this usually happens at the stage when it is clear that there are no problems with the main product functionality. The fact is that the creation of even such a small thing as an Easter egg can result in a long process, especially if you want to make everything qualitatively.
About Lewis Carroll, Homer Simpson and the Balalaika
Parallels Desktop 3. When the About window was opened, the phrase “It takes all the running” sounded in the speakers. If you want to get somewhere else, you need to run at least twice as fast as that! ”, Which was said by the Queen from“ Alice in Wonderland ”. Actually, “to move forward a little, you need to run twice as fast” still reflects the opinion of the whole PD development team about exactly how to be better than everyone else.
Easter eggs video
PD4, PD5 and PD6 . In all these three versions we used the same “Easter egg”. True, it only worked on the MacBook Pro, because it has a built-in accelerometer. To run it, you need to open About and lift the computer above the table, tilting it left and right. We drove out of the windows with favorite statements of Parallels employees from films, books, and our own expressions. However, in one of the assemblies, the developers managed to prevent a bug just in the “Easter egg”: the windows with statements went in the opposite inclination direction. If this is your case, congratulations: you are the owner of the rare version!
Easter eggs video here .
Easter eggs in versions 7 through 9
As an Easter egg, we used the image of a balalaika and a balalaika solo accompanying it. Our designers copied the balalaika from the present, donated to the last head of the development of this product to Andrey Omelyanchuk back in the mid-2000s and to this day located in his office in the Moscow office. As a musical accompaniment to the “egg”, the song of the 40s “Eh, roads ... dust and fog” was originally chosen. They decided to perform it in the style of romantic metallic, because one of our developers, Kirill Bagrinovsky, plays in the group of the corresponding direction. The text of the cover version of the song, of course, it was decided to alter a little. She was safely recorded in the studio and even included in the early builds of the product. But later, because of possible questions about the use of copyright, this implementation had to be abandoned. As a result, the final version of the "egg" sounds balalaika solo, played and recorded by our testing engineer Sergei Mitrofanov.
Easter eggs video .
Why "balalaika"?
A small excursion into history. In the early 2000s, Parallels, who was at the origins of the project, known in the company as “Uncle Yura”, worked on another project, but he was so sick of young programmers that he resorted to their room several times a day and asked: is your balalaika? It works ?! ”It was terribly interesting for him to catch the moment when PD“ takes off ”and congratulate his young colleagues on the victory, but so far they have only tried to start MS-DOS inside the virtual machine. Since then, the “balalaika” was first called the first Parallels Workstation, and then Parallels Desktop for Mac.
About the game in the "column" in the latest 10th version
In the 10th version, we decided to please users with the opportunity to play the game Columns. At one time, one of our engineers, Artem Kolomeytsev, wrote an analogue of this game for his wife. He called the game Natrix (on behalf of his wife - Natasha and the popular Tetris / Tetrix) and pursued the goal of making a version of a toy that would be better than the existing analogues of the "Speakers", in which Natasha successfully played enough. He wrote the game according to her wishes with elements of 3D and acceleration (plus he was in the fact that this task made it possible to practice with openGL, which Artem was studying at that time). To include Natrix in the Easter egg, a corresponding widget was written, and in the process several serious bugs were revealed that led to the “fall” of the virtual machine as a whole. There was even a joke among the staff of the team, that soon our support service will begin to receive appeals with the words “when I pass the third level, your program crashes”.
And, by the way, links to articles about the most famous Easter eggs in software, starting with what is generally considered the very first (in the Adventure game, which was produced in 1979 by Atari, its programmer Warren Robinette made a room with his name inside): times article , two article .
And what Easter eggs in different software do you remember most?
So that you immediately find the “egg”: in the latest versions, “Easter egg” is in the same place. Top menu -> Parallels Desktop -> About Parallels Desktop . The opening window with information about the installed version is illustrated with a Mac image with a large black button in the middle. Click on it.
Why do we do this?
- We still like it. Starting as a way to have fun in the process of technologically complex tasks (and each time outside the box, we wrote about it here ), “Easter eggs” has become one of the favorite features. And with your loved ones do not part.
- A way to work out new things for yourself, such as openGL (read about it below in the story about the egg from the 10th version), as well as catch and correct a certain number of jambs in the development process. The latter, incidentally, is important: for example, our familiar developers had to cut the easter eggs out of the software altogether, because it regularly destroyed all the work of the product for them.
- One of the ways to gamify the application. In any case, we organize contests “Find our Easter egg” quite often. Whether this method works or not is another matter. We can talk about this in the comments to the post.
About the ideologist of Easter eggs Parallels Desktop for Mac
')
The inspirer of the creation of all Easter eggs, starting from the earliest versions, was Alexander Grechishkin, the head of the development of Parallels Desktop for Mac. By the way, he is firmly convinced that Easter eggs are a hobby that should not be directly related to the product. Therefore, they never stand in terms of work and everything is done exclusively outside working hours. Of course, sometimes top management wonders if the Easter eggs will be in the new version, but this usually happens at the stage when it is clear that there are no problems with the main product functionality. The fact is that the creation of even such a small thing as an Easter egg can result in a long process, especially if you want to make everything qualitatively.
About Lewis Carroll, Homer Simpson and the Balalaika
Parallels Desktop 3. When the About window was opened, the phrase “It takes all the running” sounded in the speakers. If you want to get somewhere else, you need to run at least twice as fast as that! ”, Which was said by the Queen from“ Alice in Wonderland ”. Actually, “to move forward a little, you need to run twice as fast” still reflects the opinion of the whole PD development team about exactly how to be better than everyone else.
Easter eggs video
PD4, PD5 and PD6 . In all these three versions we used the same “Easter egg”. True, it only worked on the MacBook Pro, because it has a built-in accelerometer. To run it, you need to open About and lift the computer above the table, tilting it left and right. We drove out of the windows with favorite statements of Parallels employees from films, books, and our own expressions. However, in one of the assemblies, the developers managed to prevent a bug just in the “Easter egg”: the windows with statements went in the opposite inclination direction. If this is your case, congratulations: you are the owner of the rare version!
Easter eggs video here .
Easter eggs in versions 7 through 9
As an Easter egg, we used the image of a balalaika and a balalaika solo accompanying it. Our designers copied the balalaika from the present, donated to the last head of the development of this product to Andrey Omelyanchuk back in the mid-2000s and to this day located in his office in the Moscow office. As a musical accompaniment to the “egg”, the song of the 40s “Eh, roads ... dust and fog” was originally chosen. They decided to perform it in the style of romantic metallic, because one of our developers, Kirill Bagrinovsky, plays in the group of the corresponding direction. The text of the cover version of the song, of course, it was decided to alter a little. She was safely recorded in the studio and even included in the early builds of the product. But later, because of possible questions about the use of copyright, this implementation had to be abandoned. As a result, the final version of the "egg" sounds balalaika solo, played and recorded by our testing engineer Sergei Mitrofanov.
Easter eggs video .
Why "balalaika"?
A small excursion into history. In the early 2000s, Parallels, who was at the origins of the project, known in the company as “Uncle Yura”, worked on another project, but he was so sick of young programmers that he resorted to their room several times a day and asked: is your balalaika? It works ?! ”It was terribly interesting for him to catch the moment when PD“ takes off ”and congratulate his young colleagues on the victory, but so far they have only tried to start MS-DOS inside the virtual machine. Since then, the “balalaika” was first called the first Parallels Workstation, and then Parallels Desktop for Mac.
About the game in the "column" in the latest 10th version
In the 10th version, we decided to please users with the opportunity to play the game Columns. At one time, one of our engineers, Artem Kolomeytsev, wrote an analogue of this game for his wife. He called the game Natrix (on behalf of his wife - Natasha and the popular Tetris / Tetrix) and pursued the goal of making a version of a toy that would be better than the existing analogues of the "Speakers", in which Natasha successfully played enough. He wrote the game according to her wishes with elements of 3D and acceleration (plus he was in the fact that this task made it possible to practice with openGL, which Artem was studying at that time). To include Natrix in the Easter egg, a corresponding widget was written, and in the process several serious bugs were revealed that led to the “fall” of the virtual machine as a whole. There was even a joke among the staff of the team, that soon our support service will begin to receive appeals with the words “when I pass the third level, your program crashes”.
And, by the way, links to articles about the most famous Easter eggs in software, starting with what is generally considered the very first (in the Adventure game, which was produced in 1979 by Atari, its programmer Warren Robinette made a room with his name inside): times article , two article .
And what Easter eggs in different software do you remember most?
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/362221/
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