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It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard

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Re: It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard

#61

Post by threetonesun »

tomashubelbauer wrote: post #31
threetonesun wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decorative emojis (the stuff AI loves to add to bullet lists) don't do much. On the other hand I'd say emojis at the start/end of a sentence are as meaningful as emoticons or /s or any other Internet shorthand for conveying intent.

Decorative emojis in headings and lists help me skim documents faster than I'd otherwise be able to.

I'm curious how. I rarely see the emojis line up with the content of the header in a way that makes parsing reading the header any easier.

Re: It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard

#62

Post by bombcar »

mikkupikku wrote: post #35
bombcar wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of unicode processing bugs that existed (and maybe some still exist) alone is reason to be a bit cautious. And having emojis work "mostly" but not "everywhere" would have been something Jobs would have entirely been against - if they wouldn't work over normal non-iMessage SMS, for example, or not work reliably. Remember the "emojigate" issues where the same emoji would display differently on different phon…

I thought it was weird when they made the gun emoji look like a toy.. to make threats seem funny? Or some sort of Sapir-Whorf thing? I don't know, it never made sense.

It was more troubling that it was different - so you send a squirt gun, I see a pistol, but even worse was that it was pointing in different directions on different platforms.

Re: It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard

#63

Post by zzrrt »

esafak wrote: post #15

Do emojis enrich communication, or debase it? Why not use words, with precise meanings? Emojis are prevarication.

I used “decorative emojis” (some colored circles) to essentially color-code the labels in an app I don’t control that only let me provide text labels. It’s a little subjective, but I do believe it enhanced communication, from the data to the user, in that case.

Re: It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard

#64

Post by allenu »

badc0ffee wrote: post #58
lelanthran wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smileys were something else (pure acid, like this :-)). ISTR the brief time you mention calling these things emoticons.

IIRC "smileys" were what you got from fonts like Wingdings, and I believe those were short-lived. You could type :) and MS Word or Outlook, for example, would "helpfully" give you the Wingdings happy face, which would show up as a J for anyone who didn't have that font. :-) and friends were "emoticons" for decades.

You're probably right about the terminology being around for a while, but I think most people just called them smileys (i.e. ;) would be called a "winking smiley"). I remember seeing the term used maybe in the early- or mid-90s either on a BBS or Usenet and thinking "Ah, that's what they're called" and as a nerd being annoyed that nobody used that term colloquially.

Re: It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard

#65

Post by esafak »

harrall wrote: post #28
esafak wrote: post #15

Do emojis enrich communication, or debase it? Why not use words, with precise meanings? Emojis are prevarication.

Words don’t have precise meanings either. “He has completed the task.” versus “He pulled it off.” Their meanings are the same but their both have different subtext. Emojis are simply additional levers for subtext. It’s like using a red hot colors versus cool colors for a poster — the text might be the same but the colors provide an additional way to signal subtext. The more options, the better.

It is the precision of language that allows you to distinguish the subtext of those two sentences.

Re: It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard

#66

Post by harrall »

esafak wrote: post #65
harrall wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Words don’t have precise meanings either. “He has completed the task.” versus “He pulled it off.” Their meanings are the same but their both have different subtext. Emojis are simply additional levers for subtext. It’s like using a red hot colors versus cool colors for a poster — the text might be the same but the colors provide an additional way to signal subtext. The more options, the better.

It is the precision of language that allows you to distinguish the subtext of those two sentences.

But by that line of thinking, it’s the same with emojis. There is a subtly to which ones you use and when.

You don’t just put the same laugh emoji every time it’s funny…

Re: It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard

#68

Post by burningChrome »

Zak wrote: post #11
UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote: post #3

It’s very easy for people, especially younger people, to look at this with a 2026 understanding of the ubiquity of emoji and scoff at how ludicrous Apple was being. Things were very different. Drive-by Apple decriers will attribute anything possible to Steve Jobs’ vague “desire to control”. The reality is there were things he would obsess over and plenty he would let pass him by. Emoji only made its way into Unicode…

The obsession with control I find objectionable is not their decision not to enable emoji widely until support was stable. That's an obsession with polish , not control. The commitment to polish and self-restraint to not add features until they actually work well is something I've long appreciated about Apple. The control part is blocking third-party apps to toggle the hidden setting. If you enable unsupported featur…

So then, was it the same thing waiting 5 years longer than most companies to have something as basic as wireless charging? Or waiting until 2023 to finally adopt USB C charging?

Re: It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard

#69

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

bityard wrote: post #49
nancyminusone wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone else remember the brief time in the mid 2000s that these were called "smileys" and damn near every webpage ad wanted to install a questionable IE 6 toolbar so you could "get more smileys"? Quality kid memory for me. I also remember watching another kid click on an ad for a free ipod and then enter in his home address and other personal info.

The wikipedia entry for emoji is missing this entirely, but "smileys" were quite popular in various instant messaging apps (AOLIM, ICQ) and web forums. I was fairly sure they go back as far the mid or late 90's but I can't seem to find any hard evidence of that. (I was into computers at the time but didn't see the point of IM apps or forums when IRC and Usenet already existed.)

A really cool feature of Windows Live Messenger (perhaps also MSN Messenger before it?) was you that smileys were viral. You could add your own, and people could right-click on the ones you used to copy them to their own collection.

Re: It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard

#70

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

jamesnorden wrote: post #36

I'm confused as to why apps were able to edit this file.

I think I remember using one of these apps around 2010 or so, and I think it just triggered the emoji keyboard to appear somehow? And once it was opened once, the ability to use it persisted. But that was just my guess as to what was happening as a user.

I really doubt Apple's sandbox would have permitted editing a global preferences file like that. That might have just been the first, and not the only, method to enable emoji that people discovered.

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