Why does some software have hidden features or easter eggs? Why don't they list all the features in the manual or release notes?
|
show 2 more comments
feedback
|
|
As a software engineer who added a few "hidden" features to his own software, my reasons were simple: it gave me additional tricks to test how the software works. For example, I have added special keystrokes to one window once, to make it easier for me to navigate through the dozens of options. This allowed me to quickly go to the window. But most users would be communicating with a customer so they had no need to navigate quickly, and most would be using a mouse anyways, so I never mentioned the keyboard shortcuts. Additional uses would be to generate extra debug information or a more clearer insight in the internal workings of the application. Features that most users probably won't use, yet for developers very useful to use during development. And easter eggs? Well, many of them just become part of an application simply because developers got bored and started to play with some additional code as part of the project. Often very simple games or fun tricks that are a bit of a stress relief for them, yet for most users just not important. So, hidden functionality is often used to improve the development of the project and to provide stress relief for developers. | ||||
|
feedback
|
|
Speaking as a software developer, it adds a little more fun to the coding processes to have hidden features or easter eggs. It can also make the experience more exciting for the user when the find these hidden features. | |||
|
feedback
|
|
Easter Eggs aren't features. Most of the time they are little pranks, toys, etc. You can discover a burping-box in older versions of Photoshop, programmer names in old windows screensavers, and much more. These aren't company-endorsed features most of the time - they're items squeezed in by adventurous developers. | |||||
|
feedback
|
|
Sometimes, if a feature is so obscure that only 1% of the users would want to use it, it would just confuse the other 99%. In some of our products, we have features that we mention to users only when they need them. | |||||
feedback
|
|
In some cases these "easter eggs" are included by the developers just as a means to leave their mark on the program. In other cases these are features that are built in and more or less went undocumented for one reason or another. Sometimes features are undocumented because they cause some issues that the programming team is not prepared to fix at that time. Sometimes even a bug is dubbed a "feature" when they really do not want to fix it. | |||
|
feedback
|
|
Despite what some people think, there's no single universally-accepted way to write and release software. Every developer and every company have their own ideas about how to do it. If this bothers you, and you prefer all your software to share a look and feel, you have a few options:
| ||||
|
feedback
|
if (Question.isSubject()) Question.shouldBeWiki = TRUE;– Jonathan Sampson Jul 28 '09 at 14:12Todo.Add("Rename title to 'Why Software has Hidden Features?'");– Jonathan Sampson Jul 28 '09 at 14:16