Funky OBJ Char Quiz
Wednesday, 2005-11-23; 18:58:00
So in contrast to those lame online quizzes that make you answer hundreds upon thousands upon MILLIONS of totally subjective and probably even irrelevant questions that really should be evaluated by your friends instead of yourself in order to get an accurate evaluation, this quiz from Quarter Life Crisis is so much more fun. So I decided to figure it out. It's actually quite simple (at least using my way), and it took me only a minute or so to realize how to make that funky OBJ char thing.
Sven writes (text and image filched from his weblog):
I write (and posted in the comments of that entry):
And here's my image:
The only question left in my mind is whether or not this was the intended way of generating the image provided in the quiz entry. It could be that there's some completely different way of generating that "OBJ" character on a text clipping (as suggested by the first brief comment to the quiz entry), and is just another highlight of the Finder's often bizarre behavior.
By the way, it seems that Sven's weblog (or whatever system he uses) does some intelligent text parsing and automatically indented my list of steps, as well as changed the two successive en-dashes (right before the signature in my comment) into an em-dash. Cool!
Sven writes (text and image filched from his weblog):
Here comes a fun quiz for the Mac-aficionados:
Tell me what exactly you see on that image, how to generate it with a minimal number of steps and what happens when you edit the object’s name.
I write (and posted in the comments of that entry):
Ha! That's so simple.First, this is what I see: I see a text clipping icon with a name that seems to be a single unicode character that looks like the letters "OBJ" surrounded by a dotted line.
How to generate it with a minimal number of steps:
- First, select the word "Mac-aficionados" in this weblog entry. Click and hold on it for half a second, then drag to the desktop and release. This should create a text clipping with the name "Mac-aficionados.textClipping".
- Now, show the Character Palette. You can do this a number of ways (a is the easiest): a. Selecting "Special Characters..." from the Finder's edit menu. b. supposedly by pressing Command-Option-Y (which doesn't work for me) c. Going to the International preference pane, selecting the "Input Menu" tab, selecting "Show input menu in menu bar" at the bottom as well as "Character Palette" in the list, and then selecting "Show Character Palette" from the keyboard layout menu extra in the right half of your menu bar.
- In the "Character Palette", click in the search field at the bottom. Type "obj" and press return. After a second, a list should come up with one result: "Object Replacement Character", under the heading "Unicode Name".
- Double-click on "Object Replacement Character" in the results list. The character palette should switch to the "Code Tables" view, it should select row "0000FFF0" in the top with a title of "Specials" and a category of "Specials". In the actual code table, the character in column C and row FFF0 should be selected (right to the left of the black diamond with a white question mark). This character appears blank in the palette.
- Switch back to the Finder. Select the clipping you created in step 1 and press return to start renaming the clipping.
- Switch back to the Character Palette. With the "Object Replacement Character" still selected in the code table, press the "Insert" button (you can also double-click on the character itself). The Finder will have appeared to have entered a blank character into the text clipping's name.
- Switch back to the Finder and press return to end renaming. The Finder will ask you if you want to remove the ".textClipping" extension. Click "OK". Once you do so, you will be done -- the image above will be displayed in your Finder.
When you try to edit this object's name, here's what happens: the name turns blank, and the blinking insertion line fails to appear until you press one of the arrow keys on your keyboard. If you don't change anything and press return again, the funky "OBJ" character returns.
So do I get a million dollars?
Oh, by the way, you can see a screenshot of my Finder window with the above object by going to http://homepage.mac.com/simx/.Pictures/haiwinigetamilliondollars.png
-- Simone
And here's my image:
The only question left in my mind is whether or not this was the intended way of generating the image provided in the quiz entry. It could be that there's some completely different way of generating that "OBJ" character on a text clipping (as suggested by the first brief comment to the quiz entry), and is just another highlight of the Finder's often bizarre behavior.
By the way, it seems that Sven's weblog (or whatever system he uses) does some intelligent text parsing and automatically indented my list of steps, as well as changed the two successive en-dashes (right before the signature in my comment) into an em-dash. Cool!
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