New Twitter Code For Retweet: ♺ | Hacker News Reader

New Twitter Code For Retweet: ♺

stoweboyd.com

32 pointsTichy37 comments

An inconvenient solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

Aside from the dubious claim that this is "more distintive" can somebody explain the point to me?

I guess I can now sympathize with everyone who complained about too many econ/politics/non-ruby/xyz posts to HN.

Front page story about a suggested change from 'RT' --> '♺' on twitter? If I had less faith in HN I would label this a jump the shark moment.

It definitely belongs in the "just for fun" category.

I guess there's nothing super-wrong with posting links like this, my surprise was more that it got so many upvotes.

Perhaps, to put a HN spin on it, we could discuss the fact that Twitter is apparently aware of the difference between unicode chars and bytes, but what about SMS? After all, that 140 character limit comes from SMS's limit. Does SMS treat ♺ as 1 against the 140 limit or 3?

In case anyone is interested, I just tested a bunch of UTF-8 Japanese characters in Twitter. It counts each character as 1 on the front-end (countdown from 140 to -infinity), but counts the BYTES on the backend, so the front end will say you are under the limit, but then you click update and get an error message saying you are over the limit.

So, this idea is DOA.

The only point I see is that it looks neat. And it seemed to be an emerging meme today on Twitter, so I posted it. Already on the article I linked there are comments explaining why it doesn't make much sense (among others, it takes up 3 bytes instead of two for "RT").

So I guess it was an opportunity to witness the rise and fall of a meme within one day ;-)

Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer using "RT" as it's pretty easy to type, it's in popular usage on Twitter (so no need to explain the crazy recycling symbol), plus it's only one extra letter

"RT" as it's pretty easy to type

That's pretty much it. Anything that I can't type on a Mac using alt and possibly shift is pretty out there.

Not only that but who the heck has access to that unicode symbol on a cell phone?

Not just that, a lot of computer can't even display it correctly. Maybe twitter could auto-replace it with a small image of the sign, but that might break some twitter applications.

Fail. 'RECYCLING SYMBOL FOR GENERIC MATERIALS' (U+267A) is not generally available on platforms other than Mac OS X. On that platform it is only provided by the system font Apple Symbols (as a fallback) and versions of the included Japanese font Hiragino (what you're actually seeing). It is not included in Arial Unicode MS on Windows, which in turn is irrelevant as Arial Unicode MS is only included with Office, and (sigh) Mac OS X.

From looking at the Vista fonts I have available, it doesn't appear to be available there either. If it does work, I'd be curious to know what fonts it's provided by.

Let this be a lesson: Don't use weird Unicode characters unless you know that everyone that needs to see them can see them.

FWIW, if you can't stand the little blank boxes, here's a Free font set that covers most of Unicode: http://dejavu-fonts.org/

I found this app which you can use to find out which of your local fonts support a given symbol:

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/font/fontlist.htm?te...

On my Vista system, the 0x267a (recycling) symbol is supported by "Malgun Gothic", "Meiryo", "Microsoft JhengHei", "Microsoft YaHei", and "Segoe UI".

Not sure which of these are always available.

If I can't do it on my iPhone (via Tweetie) ... forget it

You could just copy and paste it from an other message - oh, wait...

Just because "recycle" and "retweet" both start with "re" does not mean that the recycle symbol can be co-opted for retweeting.

But, meh, it's catching on and it's part of the evolution of language. Soon we'll all be speaking Twitterese.

kthxbai.

looks like a square on my WinSvr2k8Std. Any screenshots?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_symbol

Of course this doesn't give you the full experience of unicode! But that is in fact what it is.

♲ ≠ ♺

I pulled a wishy-washy. You caught me.

It may be one less "character" than RT, but it is one more byte in UTF-8. 0xE2 0x99 0xBA. What does twitter mean with the "140 character" limit, what's a character here? I mean, http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html was written in 2003.

It's probably telling that I can't get the character to display properly in any interface... but whether of the practicality of the suggestion, or the level of my char-fu, I'm not sure.

I don't know how to type it yet, either... ;-) But it looks nice.

♳ ♴ ♵ ♶ ♷ ♸ ♹ ♺ ♻ ♲ ♼ ♽

Just copy+paste ;)

On OS X, you can enable the Character Palette which is extremely handly for inputting unicode.

Settings->International->Input menu->Character Palette[Check]

The character palette is also available under Edit->Special Characters in most applications, or by the shortcut Cmd-Opt-T (or ⌥⌘T if you will).

Under Linux you can enable the compose key, with setxkbmap -option "compose:rwin"

This lets you prefix digraphs with rwin, and have them print unicode characters. This is (to some extent) configurable, although I am not sure on the location of the mapping.

EDIT: Some examples (default settings): ä ç ß ¢ £ ½ ⅓ ¼ ⅙ ⅛ » « ¥ õ ° — – º

Nope, just little blocks. Some interfaces display it as one solid dark monolith, some as empty squares, and a special few as festive little glyphs with mysterious markings inside. (XP SP2, every browser under the sun and then some.)

With OS X you take beautiful fonts for granted sometimes...

You probably just need to track down the right font that has them.

Sure, because everyone wants to have to mess with their global font settings in order to use a website properly

Probably true, but it shouldn't be that difficult to set up a unicode font as a fallback for all other fonts.

I see them fine on Ubuntu/Firefox

in windows xp with google chrome I just see box box box box box etc. In fact nothing on the blog displayed either.

This website is pretty useful: www.copypastecharacter.com Just click on the symbol you want, and it's put on your clipboard. They just updated it today to support the ♺ symbol.

Stowe Boyd is showing his lack of a tech background here. The recycle symbol is 1 byte longer in UTF8 encoding and nobody on Windows can read it. I call Fail.

Too bad most of Windows users won't be able to see it correctly. And too bad those are the vast majority of Twitter users. (And it's complicated to type in.)

I rather save space with interrobang: ‽

lots of clients don't render unicode well. I think TweetDeck doesn't show the rest of the message after barfing on unicode, meaning instead of a retweet you'd just get a blank tweet. RT is standard

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