It’s not that Apple’s emoji keyboard is necessarily bad, but it could be better. If you’re a hardcore emoji user, you know that it’s a pain to scroll through and find the perfect emoji in the moment.
Maybe you’re looking for the perfect funny face or food item for the conversation. To take your emoji game to the next level, you need a third-party keyboard called Emoji++.
Emojing has already replaced texting as the go-to zero-effort communication tool of youngsters everywhere, and all those emoji version of popular songs and TV shows are about a lot more elaborate thanks to huge unicode update.
250 new emoji have been added to unicode standard 7.0 that is used to standardize the presentation of text across different platforms like iOS, Android, and Windows, and while it’s still up to software makers to actually implement the new standards, you can expect them to land on iOS pretty soon.
There are a number of way to track emoji use on Twitter but this globe of real-time emoji tweeted across the world has me so spellbound I can’t look away.
Good thing too, because unlike EmojiTracker, it won’t cause a seizure.
When it comes to emoji, Apple supports everything from a smiling pile of feces to intricately detailed sunset landscapes. But if you’re looking for racial diversity there’s not a black person to be found and we’re not sure if the dude with the thick mustache is supposed to be latino, but if you scroll through the collection you’ll get the point.
The lack of racial diversity in emojis was not lost on MTV Act’s Joey Parker who decided to email Tim Cook about the controversy and was surprised to get a response the next day about Apple’s efforts to make emoji more diverse.
Here’s what Apple PR Queen Katie Cotton had to say about the emoji controversy:
Visuals are extremely helpful, especially when you’re trying to differentiate between a lot of text information.
Consider your contacts list, which could have hundreds, maybe even thousands of people’s information in it. Sure, you can break them up into groups and just search for the contacts you want, but there is a neat way to find what you’re looking for using the Emoji keyboard that’s now included in OS X (and iOS).
Sure, you use the Messages app to send along SMS and iMessages all day long. You know how to use Emoji’s, too, with a tap on the international keyboard button on your iPhone.
I bet you even use regular text emoticons, like semi-colon and parenthesis to create a wink, or colon and parenthesis to create a smile.
But have you ever tried to have your iPhone turn your text-based emoticon into an Emoji? I bet you haven’t.
In case you missed it, OS X Mavericks came out yesterday and it’s free. If you’ve downloaded the latest operating system from our fine friends in Cupertino, then you’ll be able to check out this neat little tip.
We all love emoji, right? Those cute little emoticons came into vogue for iOS a while back, and then were rolled into Apple’s mobile operating system as a special keyboard. They’re also avaialable in OS X Mavericks, and you can pull them up with very little effort, in almost any app.
Don’t forget that the OS X Mavericks beta isn’t a final version—it’s meant to be used by developers to ensure that their software will work with Apple’s latest and greatest. With that disclaimer in mind, let’s check out a new little feature in the beta.
Many apps have had access to special characters before, like iChat and Messages. You’d simply click the little smiley face, for example, and get all the fun emoticons Apple has provided.
If you wanted to type a special character in a text document, though, you’d have to remember that Option-8 is a text bullet, and Option-K is the degrees symbol, and Option-2 gives you the Trademark symbol.
Now, though, in OS X Mavericks beta, you can see visually what special characters are available to you across all applications. Here’s how.
Facebook Pages Manager for iOS just got a big version 2.0 update that brings a number of performance improvements and new features. Facebook says the app has been rebuilt to offer a smoother, faster experience, while photo filters and support for emoji and stickers have been added.
With iOS 5, Apple included Emoji as a standard keyboard option, obviating the need for separate Emoji apps (previously the only way to get the cute characters on your iOS device). The Emoji option continued in iOS 6, adding a bunch of new cute characters, as well as some welcome gay and lesbian avatars as well.
If you haven’t enabled Emoji yet, or you want to disable it for whatever reason, read on.
Apple’s cracking down on apps that have no other purpose but offering emoji — that cute emoticon character set popular with some text messengers — and are kicking developer’s apps out of the App Store if they do nothing else. The reason? iOS 6 already does emoji.
Last week we discovered the funniest way to play Connector Four on an iPhone. It’s silly and slightly painful, but completely awesome in a nerdy way. Now someone’s raised the stakes and figured out that you can also create games of Checkers or Chess using emoji. If you’re really bored trying to figure out how to celebrate Columbus Day today, now you have an activity that’s guaranteed to take up a few hours of your time.
Source: Reddit
There are like 50 billion games on the App Store and a lot of them have Game Center integration so you can battle your friends at Angry Birds, or Temple Run or Tic-Tac-Toe or whatever. But if you want to see how much your friends really love you, try playing them in a emoji game of Connect Four. It’s painful and kind of tedious and you have to remember to play with virtual-gravity, but it’s also totally awesome, in a dumb way.
We’ve all been itching to get our hands on iOS 6 since it got its first unveiling at WWDC back in June, and today, three months after that announcement, the software finally gets its public debut. Apple’s packed a ton of new features into this update, including some major new features like Map and Passbook, plus some enhancements to existing apps and features, such as new Siri capabilities and a VIP inbox in Mail.
Apple’s been promoting some of these features on its website, but there are tons you may not have heard about. With that said, here’s your comprehensive guide to everything that’s new in iOS 6.
One of this smaller things that has always frustrated me about the iOS keyboard is that I have to capitalize letters manually before and after quotation marks, and after emoji. It’s not that it’s difficult to do, it’s just that the keyboard built into iOS is already capable of some clever things, so why can’t it do this?
Well, in iOS 6, it can.
This is really great. Apple has taken the initiative in iOS 6 to update the operating system’s selection of emoji — or visual characters — to now not have some options for gay and lesbian users, including a gay and lesbian couple holding hands. Sweet!
That’s not all, of course. There’s also some cute new monkey who can do no evil, see no evil, and hear no evil, apparently. Hope they can’t smell evil, either, because they are just a few columns down from a grinning, anthropomorphical piece of crap.
I wish there were some gay and lesbian monkey emoji, but I guess Apple had to leave something back for iOS 7.
Source: Techcrunch
We’re still trawling through the new iOS 6 beta releases that Apple pushed out after its WWDC keynote yesterday, and we continue to find nice new features and improvements. If you’re as excited about iOS 6 as we are, you’d probably like to hear about them.
Here’s a few changes Apple has made to emoji, Reminders, and more.
Apple extended its library of iOS emoji icons in its iOS 5.1 release, and the icons have been present in every firmware build that has landed ever since. However, the Cupertino company is yet to activate the latest set, and so they remain hidden within your device’s software. Fortunately, a new jailbreak tweak called Emoji2 for iOS 5.1+ unlocks them all for you.
The world of iOS was set alight when it was realized anybody can utilize Emoji–full colour emoticons, popular mostly in Japan. Suddenly SMS got a lot more interesting! However, with OS X Lion you can also utilize them on your Mac, making for everything from better emails to more colorful documents.
It’s about time! Apple finally made accessing emoticons via the Emoji keyboard a part of iOS. Prior to iOS 5 you had to jump through all kinds of hoops to get them. They’ve been a part of iOS for longer than I can remember, but initially they were only accessible by jailbreak and later by applications that were able to activate them. You used the app, discarded it and were on your way to emoticon heaven.
Now Apple has included an easy way to activate them and use them as much as you want.
In iOS 5, Apple introduced a slew of new features and updates to the most advanced mobile operating system on the planet. While users had to rely on third party hacks or jailbreak workarounds to enable an Emoji keyboard before, Emoji has been added as a standard keyboard in iOS 5.
While the Emoji keyboard is not new to the iPhone, it seemed as if it was disabled in iPhone OS 4.0 .
For those of you developers big into the Emoji keyboard, here is how to regain the Emoji keyboard while still using iPhone OS 4.0 :