Almost Fired for Color Picker Poetry
It was frankly a thing I liked about working for Apple in those days. The engineers were the one’s driving the ship. As I said, I wrote an HSV picker because it was, I thought, a more intuitive color space for artists. I wrote the HTML color picker because of the advent of the web. And I wrote the crayon picker because it seemed to me to be the kind of thing Apple was all about: HSL, RGB — these were kind of nerdy color spaces — a box of crayons is how the rest of us picked colors.
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And it turned out, to my surprise, Apple shipped all the color pickers. No marketing or design person ever asked for them. But we, engineers, were not only programmers, we were also users and often had an intuitive sense of what other Macintosh users wanted. We knew what we wanted anyway. I was creating the things I would have wanted.
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It seemed like a humble and discreet Easter egg. I mistakenly assumed the poem was in the public domain but, regardless, a single stanza would seem to me to be “fair use”. Still, it should have been obvious to me that Apple Computer Inc. was going to be very much copyright-violation averse.
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A few other Easter eggs that had nothing to do with intellectual property rights were in the color pickers as well. In time, the crayons in the crayon color picker would appear worn down or broken. This had no effect on the functionality of the color picker but was kind of … cute? I believe the crayons were all restored though on Christmas Day (a new box of crayons!).
