31–40 of 74 posts
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Yeah, they're wildly popular with just about everyone I know 25 and under, especially on sites like Instagram. There's even been a music video created from them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmlJveN9IkI
Ok thanks. That's well under my age so I understand. Does it replace "TXT SPK" which I'm still too old to use and find terribly annoying? (I'm sounding like a right grumpy old git here)
These look really cool as does the technology, but I don't think I've ever used Emoji past a couple of ASCII smilies. My Android handset seems to have them but I don't use them and neither does anyone else I know. Is this a cultural thing I'm missing?
If you're not female, a teenager, or from Japan, you're probably just missing the cultural context in which Emoji are used. I'm none of those, but I think Emoji are fun, and use them fairly regularly in casual sms conversations. There is also much more history of their (easy) use on iOS than Android, which did not support them very well, if at all, until recent years.
And before graphical "emoticons" people have been using ASCII smilies going back to the 80s on IRC.
If someone doesn't get the appeal, the reason is much simpler - they don't text chat a lot. That's fine. If they would, they'd instantly see the need, because plain text can't by itself properly support the subtlety of what one says in a conversation.
It's not "the future of color fonts", it's just the present of emoji in Windows. And I really don't like the way they did this. The technical approach is smart, but lazy, and the resulting emoji look bland and lack definition. No wonder, since this approach doesn't support the way artists work. It's not SVG, it's not PostScript, it's not a bitmap, it's just a glyph sandwich. No opacity, no gradients, no effects. It m…
Well thank god. What you call "opacity, gradients, and effects", I call "total inability to be bolded, colored, embossed, etc." Apple's and Google's emoji basically entirely ignore CSS in favor of looking, well, exactly the way they look. Styling emoji to actually fit your site's theme? Who'd have imagined?
It's not "the future of color fonts", it's just the present of emoji in Windows. And I really don't like the way they did this. The technical approach is smart, but lazy, and the resulting emoji look bland and lack definition. No wonder, since this approach doesn't support the way artists work. It's not SVG, it's not PostScript, it's not a bitmap, it's just a glyph sandwich. No opacity, no gradients, no effects. It m…
> It's not SVG, it's not PostScript, it's not a bitmap, it's just a glyph sandwich. No opacity, no gradients, no effects. Well thank god. What you call "opacity, gradients, and effects", I call "total inability to be bolded, colored, embossed, etc." Apple's and Google's emoji basically entirely ignore CSS in favor of looking, well, exactly the way they look. Styling emoji to actually fit your site's theme? Who'd have…
When you set your text to be bold, that's a separate font, made by a human hand.
Browsers have a fake bold look when the font is missing, but it's not a look you want on your site. They just, well... smudge it to the right. For Emoji the fake bold look is disabled, because bold or italic emoji is just non-sense on the face of it, so they don't support weight settings.
Also, you can't set the color of Windows Emoji via CSS. They're already colored.
These look really cool as does the technology, but I don't think I've ever used Emoji past a couple of ASCII smilies. My Android handset seems to have them but I don't use them and neither does anyone else I know. Is this a cultural thing I'm missing?
I think it's a lot more useful if you have a layer of inderection on the input. I.e. what you type goes through autocomplete or an IME before being sent to the application you type into. It eases the need to switch to a different keyboard altogether just to input emoji, you just type "heart" and choose from the candidates. That's a reason it is so heavily used in Japan, where they already have a two layer input syste…
Some Japanese keyboards will sometimes suggest emoji during input conversion (the normal kana->kanji step), but it's a somewhat haphazard way of inputting them, and it's often easier just use the dedicated emoji input. The reason seems fairly clear to me: many emoji encode nuances that don't map easily to single words or small compounds in a way that's easy for a user to predict...
[My old non-smart phone would suggest some emoji during input conversion (e.g. if you convert "ねこ", it would suggest "🐱" and "(=^ェ^=)" as well as "猫"), but my current (Japanese) Android phone doesn't seem to do any of that at all (using the vendor Japanese keyboard); to input emoji you need to use the emoji input... :]
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> It's not SVG, it's not PostScript, it's not a bitmap, it's just a glyph sandwich. No opacity, no gradients, no effects. Well thank god. What you call "opacity, gradients, and effects", I call "total inability to be bolded, colored, embossed, etc." Apple's and Google's emoji basically entirely ignore CSS in favor of looking, well, exactly the way they look. Styling emoji to actually fit your site's theme? Who'd have…
You seem so passionate about this, it hurts to break your heart. When you set your text to be bold, that's a separate font , made by a human hand. Browsers have a fake bold look when the font is missing, but it's not a look you want on your site. They just, well... smudge it to the right. For Emoji the fake bold look is disabled, because bold or italic emoji is just non-sense on the face of it, so they don't support…
Because the colored glyphs use a palette instead of hard-coded colors, it's possible to assign semantic meanings or names to each palette entry and remap them. This would enable you to render a 'high contrast' version, or adjust the primary color of an emoji (for example, changing the skin tone of a face), etc.
The latter is actually a topic of concern: Most current emoji represent a caucasian or light-skinned individual, so the lack of emojis that represent other races is a problem. People are still figuring out how to deal with it.
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I think it's a lot more useful if you have a layer of inderection on the input. I.e. what you type goes through autocomplete or an IME before being sent to the application you type into. It eases the need to switch to a different keyboard altogether just to input emoji, you just type "heart" and choose from the candidates. That's a reason it is so heavily used in Japan, where they already have a two layer input syste…
On all the Japanese devices I've used, emoji input is a separate "keyboard" (or rather a different mode in the standard keyboard). Some Japanese keyboards will sometimes suggest emoji during input conversion (the normal kana->kanji step), but it's a somewhat haphazard way of inputting them, and it's often easier just use the dedicated emoji input. The reason seems fairly clear to me: many emoji encode nuances that do…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On all the Japanese devices I've used, emoji input is a separate "keyboard" (or rather a different mode in the standard keyboard). Some Japanese keyboards will sometimes suggest emoji during input conversion (the normal kana->kanji step), but it's a somewhat haphazard way of inputting them, and it's often easier just use the dedicated emoji input. The reason seems fairly clear to me: many emoji encode nuances that do…
The Apple iOS and OS X Japanese keyboards suggest emoji for words along side the Kanji (your ねこ example) and that seems to be the main way the people around me enter them (I'm in Japan). It's easier to use since you don't have to go paging through 20 pages of emoji hunting for a particular one. I have yet to use Android since they added emoji support so I'm not sure what's going on there.
Anyway, the main point I'm trying to make is that the method of Japanese language input doesn't seem to adequately explain why emoji are so popular in Japan, because the support for conversion-based emoji input is haphazard even in Japan.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's a lot more useful if you have a layer of inderection on the input. I.e. what you type goes through autocomplete or an IME before being sent to the application you type into. It eases the need to switch to a different keyboard altogether just to input emoji, you just type "heart" and choose from the candidates. That's a reason it is so heavily used in Japan, where they already have a two layer input syste…
On all the Japanese devices I've used, emoji input is a separate "keyboard" (or rather a different mode in the standard keyboard). Some Japanese keyboards will sometimes suggest emoji during input conversion (the normal kana->kanji step), but it's a somewhat haphazard way of inputting them, and it's often easier just use the dedicated emoji input. The reason seems fairly clear to me: many emoji encode nuances that do…
About the android phones, I was a bit surprised by the low quality of Japanese support. But I didn't try the ATOK keyboard nor the input available on Sony phones for instance, only the Google IME. To Apple's credit, they've been doing IME on the mac for long enough to have a very good integration of the emoji in the system dictionary.
But really, my point was not only on the colourful emoji, but more on the fact that characters like ↑,♡,◎,△ are just unusable on a daily basis on a US/european computer, but are super easily summoned on a system with an IME. And Japanese people have been using these kind of pictograms in their communication for decades, the emoji used on the phones being just an advanced kind of the same thing. I think that would be the main cultural difference regarding to emoji.