The Google Code blog dedicated today's post to Antoine de Saint-Exup�ry's story The Little Prince, in honor of the book's 110th birthday.

"The Little Prince starts with a picture titled Drawing Number One, which grown-ups typically interpret as a hat, but only the acute eye of a child can reveal is actually a snake digesting an elephant," write Roger Trias Sanz and Nimrod Talmon on behalf of the Google Tools team. They add, "unfortunately we were those kids who just saw it as a sum of two Gaussians."

The Google Tools team stresses the importance of developing tools for visual storytelling, inspired in part by the open imagination of Little Prince. They cite the Fox in arguably the book's most important quotation: "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."