Show HN: Emojiboard, a JavaScript keyboard for web forms | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Emojiboard, a JavaScript keyboard for web forms

github.com

4 pointshughstephens5 comments

Feel free to ask any questions (improvement suggestions (or even better pull reqs) are welcome!) - we just pulled this out of our existing app Schedugram as a friend asked to use it so I figured why not?

Essentially it's a jQuery dependent keyboard in a style generally similar to iOS (category and layout) that attaches to a <textarea>.

Great plugin. I created something similar but for Twitter (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/emojitwitter/figia...), the only issue I found was the emoji-font or the way to show emojis inside a textarea tag (see extension sample images). OS X and iOS have a great compatibility to show this, but for Windows and Linux I found weird looking emojis.

What could be a good solution for this?

Yeah that one is hard to fix. We use the minEmoji set which will replace the unicode chars with SVG or inline image – that's why we folded it into our code – that way it shows up on desktops without an extension in Chrome (in particular). I haven't built a chrome extension so I don't know how easy it would be to fold it into an extension, but that's where I would recommend you start.

I'll admit that I haven't tested emojiboard in detail on Windows, but whenever a customer has a problem we can often tell them to install one of the browser-wide emoji typing solutions in Chrome and it will fix it, which I'm guessing is just something like minEmoji wrapped into a chrome extension!

How is it better? I still can't wrap my head around its improved functionality?

Better than what? Many of the other alternatives didn't have quite the same "iOS style" friendliness (a lot haven't had a whole lot of work done to them of late), and didn't submit as a unicode character (designed to append a PNG or SVG to the textarea). Also design-wise our customers preferred a large image layout on desktop, because it's a lot easier to click than small icons (say 16x16).

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