what's the best mac prank you have pulled on somebody?

There used to be a Macromedia Director movie that would take screen shot of your desktop and then blend in a dialog of stuff being put into the trash and deleted. Power users would know immediately what it was, but newbies used to crap themselves.

The best mac prank
was system 7.

*shudder*

Back in the System 7.x days I was known to put an alias to the Shutdown app (or whatever it was called) in the startup folder, system would boot up and promptly shut itself down.

I've done a few nasty ones with OS X...

1.) Created an AppleScript that would activate when the user went to launch Safari (or any other app for that matter) that would automatically change the desktop picture to an all black screen with Darwin/Unix in the background and place a nice Kernel Panic box in the middle....

2.) Took a screen shot of the users's desktop, then placed that as their current desktop picture...hid the dock on top of the screen (thanks TinkerTool), and under Finder preferences chose to "Hide Hard Disks" on the Desktop...

The best prank I ever pulled on someone is to go onto MacNN and ask tons of useless questions, starting up as many threads as I could...

Oh, wait, that's you...

P.S. "confucious slam" - your sig is WAY WAY to big.

I did something similar, except I took a screen shot of my OS X desktop at home then set that as the wallpaper on a co-workers XP machine.

refresh.

Back in early 2001 when OSX was still crap, I used to post '10.1.x update is out!!!!' on just about every Mac forum and watch people respond 'It doesn't show up in software update'.

I got tired of that joke after a while. So did they...you lot.

The NVwls system extension, it stopped all the vowels on the keyboard from working, and, well it made me laugh watching people type!

back in the days of OS 7 (8?), there used to be a system extension that would invert mouse movements (up=down, etc.) ... was always nice to see confused co-workers struggle with that one

for OS X, there's Poop Alerts which is fun if you install it on all the macs in your office ... highly obnoxious after a few minutes, though

I think the meanest thing I ever did was place the Mac version of BackOrifice (Remote control trojan that was mainly meant for Windows that gave one priviliges from far and wide) on someone's Mac and playing some weird tricks from across the room (Sudden restarts, files moving of their own volition etc).

I used some terminal commands (mpg123) and remote login to freak out my roommate a few times during my freshman year.

I'd be in class or at one of the engineering labs, and he'd be back in the room and just hear my stereo start blaring then stop mid-song.

It was worth a few cheep laughs.

im a big fan of the screenshot, hide the dock and remove the desktop icons. if you can disable right click on the mouse as well, youre golden. pretty simple, but still damn funny

replace the StartupPicture with a black sad mac with hex below it.

that was fun.

many many years ago a colleague of mine (really) rigged my boss' mac so that the i key was linked to a disgusting puke system sound file. she went nuts and I think she fired someone without much thought around the time partly due to much aggravation caused by this. she had no clue how to get rid of it for many days, eventually I think she just muted the speaker of her crappy performa that she adored!... it was funny though

Back when I was in high school, I downloaded an app called Radiation and Trigger for the classic Mac OS. It consisted of an extension and an application, and allowed you to make error boxes show up on another computer on the network.

When my brother got on the main machine, I started generating errors from an extra Mac on the network. I started with simple ones, such as "An error of type -1 has occurred." After sending a bunch of those every few minutes, he still wasn't suspicious yet, so I sent this error message: 'The application "Killer HD Erase Virus" has unexpectedly quit, because an error of type 10 occurred.' My brother freaked, and came to me to ask me what to do. Then he noticed what was going on...

Later, my mom got on the computer. and I decided to send the default message: "The radiation shield on this Macintosh has failed. Please step back five feet." The look on her face was just priceless as she started reading the text aloud in a very worried tone.

I also had some fun doing similar smart-ass things with Program Linking and AppleScript... closing windows as soon as they opened them, making the computer say things like "ouch! quit hitting the mouse button so hard!" etc. etc.

Setup a folder action to close the folder window as soon as it's opened.

I was trying to remember what that one was called, thanks for reminding me - we once installed it on the Mac of a non geek colleague. Things got slightly out of hand when he fled his office after having been confronted with: "The radiation shield on your Mac has failed. Your screen is about to implode. Please leave the room immediately."

Good times, good times

Didn't Windows NT have a "feature" like this installed by default? I remember a lot of this going on at the computer labs in school.