Abusing Emoji in iOS and Your Mac | Hacker News Reader

Abusing Emoji in iOS and Your Mac

zachholman.com

271 pointslysol58 comments

Here's hoping for a monospace emoji font variant, so we can use them in our code. That 'pile of shit' tag might come in handy.

Well, it's in Unicode... why not recreate the control character smiley faces from the US IBM code page? :)

Panic was first with an emoji domain:

http://www.panic.com/blog/2011/07/the-worlds-first-emoji-dom...

http://💩.la

Don't forget that most of these characters fall outside the Unicode BMP. Testing your APIs with these is a great way to see if any part of them (database, serialization, etc) can't handle these codepoints.

Unless the Emoji-American community steps out of the shadows and organizes into effective advocacy groups, many of these gaps in functionality will never be closed.

Doesn't work in the latest Chrome on Windows 7. What fonts do I have to get to see piles of poo[0] and love hotels[1] properly?

0: http://boingboing.net/2012/02/03/unicodes-pile-of-poo-cha.ht...

1: http://unicodelovehotel.com/

It looks like [1] specifies 'Lucida Grande' in the CSS.

That second one is oddly broken (FF on Win7). I see the fallback image http://unicodelovehotel.com/unicodelovehotel.jpg but when I select it, I get a bed with a heart over it. 🏩 I believe that's Verdana in my browser.

  🏩 <--

Unicodelovehotel.com was on hacker news a while back. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3837359

Check out the source to see all the fallbacks I implemented to make at least something show up in most browsers/platforms.

Symbola seems to have a number of emoji people are using.

http://www.fontineed.com/font/35288_symbola

http://www.4shared.com/file/xh0VBvUg/Symbola.html

I installed symbola months ago but nothing uses it. Do I have to edit the registry entries related to font fallbacks? What have I failed to do?

It's probably been more than five years since I've installed a font under Windows, so I'll just hope MSFT's own tutorial answers your question:

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/truetypeinstall.mspx

The old one didn't have these symbols. When I installed it on debian linux (called: ttf-ancient-fonts - but you have to use the testing repository) it was used immediately.

Well I remember testing it on love hotel, which I specifically checked was in symbola if I set the font manually. But it wouldn't render if it was embedded in normal text.

The main site for symbola is here: http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/

That site seemed to be down when I posted.

My http://unicodelovehotel.com site has really been coming in handy lately.

https://gist.github.com/3739562

Russ Cox and Dennis Ritchie remind us (from a decade or two ago) that just because you can, doesn't mean you should

If you're having trouble seeing the Emoji, they work great on Windows 8 and IE 10

Best viewed at 1024x768

http://www.istartedsomething.com/20120818/microsoft-backport...

Wikipedia has had article URLs with emojis for quite some time now:

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/🍔 -> Hamburger

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/💩 -> Feces

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/👀 -> Human eye

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/🏧 -> Automated teller machine

OSX Snow Leopard: Fail. Junk display in Safari & Chrome, Hex boxen on Firefox. Actually works in the latest version of Camino, although the story seems to have come out not quite right: Santa, Rocket, People, Fish, Pizza, Building, Movie camera, Earmuffs, Watermelon, Bike, Chicken, (Hide-and-seek) Seeker.

A "If you don't see the emoji, then download these fonts" right up-front would have been immensely helpful.

> Actually works in the latest version of Camino, although the story seems to have come out not quite right: Santa, Rocket, People, Fish, Pizza, Building, Movie camera, Earmuffs, Watermelon, Bike, Chicken, (Hide-and-seek) Seeker.

I get the exact same result on iOS5[0], so apparently the story just has no relation to the emoji. And the characters are not super clear at default font sizes

There's a broken [NEW] emoji lower down the page though, displays as a hexbox.

[0] confirmed by UnicodeChecker, the characters are {FATHER CHRISTMAS} {ROCKET} {TWO MEN HOLDING HANDS} {FISH} {SLICE OF PIZZA} {LOVE HOTEL} {MOVIE CAMERA} {HEADPHONE} {WATERMELON} {BICYCLE} {ROOSTER} {SEE-NO-EVIL MONKEY}

He says right in the post that it's a feature of Lion and Mountain Lion.

Those of us who haven't upgraded, for whatever reason, can just push a rope, eh? Display is linked to the Unicode renderer and available fonts. Either Camino did some sort of net-fetch magic for the characters it didn't have fonts for or my regular browsers are slightly broken and don't realize that they actually have the right font available.

Perhaps I am missing something, but how does a picture of Santa Claus, Rocket, 2 People, Fish, Pizza and other seemingly out of place things translate into "Let's go meet at Chipotle and..."

I assume that this is an error. I couldn't get it to work in Firefox on OSX 10.7 so I used Safari.

http://i.imgur.com/Tpnyc.png

It's a joke.

Oh man, I feel stupid.

I attempted to read the article at first, but Firefox, on OSX, didn't display anything at all. So I got confused and kept re-reading the first paragraph or so before I realized something was missing. By that point I wasn't focused on actually reading the article, but getting the emoji on the screen.

All well

Funny. I ran into an issue a few weeks ago where coworkers couldn't see me when I was online. Turns out my computer name (🐒💨) caused an error in Adium (which most coworkers use for chat).

Who knows what other weird issues this was causing... so I reverted back to a proper ASCII computer name.

quitter!

I was actually playing with using Unicode emoji for a webpage this week. Being able to use characters as icons would be fantastically easy for a lot of use cases!

Unfortunately, as others have noted, it doesn't work on many platforms: Safari works on 10.7+, Firefox doesn't seem to support it at all yet [1], and I don't follow Chromium that much any more but it seems like it's not there yet, either [2].

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=715798 [2]: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=62435

Emoji work in most browsers. The problem is that many fonts are missing the corresponding characters. You just need to pick a good font. You'll be missing full color icons, though.

Example page with an emoji character that works almost everywhere (with a web font based on Symbola): http://unicodepanda.com/

I would guess that most fonts will lack emoji characters, and always will, just like most fonts won't have all umpteen-thousand hanzi/kanji. I'm no expert on HTML fonts, but I thought it was the browser's job to find and use a font which contains the character on the page. I can write Japanese text, and specify it should be "Comic Sans", and every web browser I've ever tried will pick a reasonable font to display them, rather than leaving a Comic Sans-sized blank area on the page.

OS X comes with at least one font with these characters, yet apart from Safari, none of my web browsers can seem to use it. To me, that means it doesn't work.

While not exactly what you are proposing, ff you want/need to use characters as icons, there is a pretty neat hack called Font Awesome (http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/). It's used to replace the twitter bootstrap icons with font files; seems to work pretty well so far (with no need to re-color individual icons... you can style the font/icons with css).

Things like <div class="icon-flag" style="color:red; font-size:36px"> will create a 36point red flag character for you.

Has anybody used Emoji in Dropbox folder names?

if you haven't tried using 💰 as the name of a branch in git well then you haven't lived.

Just renamed my wireless networks with a cityscape and bar theme: https://img.skitch.com/20120921-8r3d1uchbsphatfjf9iuc9wx2c.p...

This has got to be one of the most beautiful/ugly things I have ever seen!

It's a shame on OSX/iOS. When I've used these characters and viewed on Safari it turns them into raster icons ... exactly what I don't want. Windows and Linux are fine.

Anyone know how to disable this "feature?"

>It's a shame on OSX/iOS. When I've used these characters and viewed on Safari it turns them into raster icons ... exactly what I don't want. Windows and Linux are fine.

Your comment does not make sense.

1) When "you've used these characters" where? On a webpage?

2) They ARE raster icons. What did you expect them to be? Fonts don't have multiple colors.

3) How does "Windows and Linux" handle them better? Most apps there don't handle them AT ALL.

You seem to be mistaken. Some operating systems display them as colour images, but that is not essential at all. They are mapped to Unicode characters, and so when displayed as characters, as in normal applications with an appropriate font, they are vector-based and monochrome. See e.g. http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F300.pdf linked from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji

Yes, but the full on experience is the translation to full color images.

That's how the Japanese use them in their mobiles, no?

Yep.

These are unicode codepoints and handled just fine everywhere but on Apple gear, and (I think IE6/XP). If you've never seen them it means you are on Apple or never bothered to install the fonts.

Annoyingly Emoji is not rendered in Google Chrome on OSX Lion (my main browser), I just get blank spaces, it's the same in Firefox. It seems Emoji only works in Safari on Lion.

yeah, I found the same - however on mouseover and clickthrough on the wiki links to the emoji pages (above this post in the comments) I am getting the characters in both the link preview and in the title bar.

strange

see what happens when the zoo takes over https://twitter.com/1dotai/status/248950126717050880

This was a really entertaining post. Well done! 👍

My work computer (Mac) is named

> (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

With the table replaced by my name upside down. Windows machines don't even bother to show it.

Is there any way to make Emoji part of a custom bash prompt in Terminal? That would be rad.

yes, terminal.app will render emoji. A friend has a pizza slice as his prompt

Do you know how he set the custom prompt? I was trying to edit my .bash_profile and couldn't use emoji.

Haha, well done. Bravo. 👏

That article made me laugh pretty freakin' hard.

This is amazing.

I guess he read the reddit post 2 days ago.

My new iPhone is now a piece of poo :-D

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