Apple Key, Splat & Swedish Campground

Sometimes, the interesting things are already spoken about, read and filtered.  Sometimes, you run into interesting things that are worthy of an individual post and are lazy.  Every now and then, you might find yourself energized with an idea but then get lost in the writing.  So, I decided to start here.

For those with an Apple computer, i.e., Macintosh, you may have now noticed the Apple Key down on your keyboard to the right or left of the spacebar.  Look for it.  If you don't have it, then you probably bought into the Apple side of things post 2007 when the keyboard was redesigned without it.  In place, "command" was written.  But that little symbol accompanying either the former or the latter, what the heck do we call it?  Enter a story found on folklore.org, "Swedish Campground"

Finally she came across a floral symbol that was used in Sweden to indicate an interesting feature or attraction in a campground. She rendered a 16 x 16 bitmap of the little symbol and showed it to the rest of the team, and everybody liked it. Twenty years later, even in OS X, the Macintosh still has a little bit of a Swedish campground in it.  -Andy Hertzfeld

In another story, a famous blogger named Dan Frommer launched his adeptly named blog "Splat Eff" back in July 2011 further enlightening readers about the symbol.  Check out what he says here on, What does SplatF mean?

Did you learn something?