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 phones and make a funny message seem threatening, etc?
The control part is blocking third-party apps to toggle the hidden setting. If you enable unsupported features using a third-party app, the expectation of polish is obviously void. It would even be fine if Apple refused to carry apps like that in their polished, curated store, if they didn't forbid users from installing apps any other way.
The iPhone was a big departure from that.
I also think users should be in control of granting or denying that kind of special access, but that's a separate discussion.
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.
ISTR the brief time you mention calling these things emoticons.
:-) and friends were "emoticons" for decades.
(I was into computers at the time but didn't see the point of IM apps or forums when IRC and Usenet already existed.)
I miss those animated smileys.
Even WhatsApp and other popular social messaging platforms (Instagram, Signal, etc.) don't have them. Instead, we got GIFs (whose online gallery takes ages to load in WhatsApp, in recent months, at least on my phone) and animated stickers. sigh
If you want a trip down memory lane.
Eventually, I decided that was a complete waste of time and now I use words.
BTW, one of the things that turned me off from emojis is they looked like the stickers 2nd graders would use, along with a Playmobil look.
^_^
Ah the halcyon days of feelin' pompous for using random squigglies to convey emotion.
Still remember being scandalized by the flip table emoticon using characters I couldn't find on my keyboard. So jealous I had to ...
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
well, not that actually. just paste, I guess.
Emoji originally came from Docomo phones in Japan around 1999. (Or I think those were the first ones actually called "emoji"; some other earlier devices had similar character sets.)
I love how this person gets the credit, deservedly so, and the irony of the unsung people who did all the hard work of actually creating the support but with its potential nerfed.
Perhaps a rehabilitation committee can track those people down and we can give their stories and their soulless managers some well earned justice!
There are also ways that emoji used as such are better, or at least more accessible, than their facial/body language counterparts: a screen reader can read the name of an emoji to a blind person to get a sense of it whereas facial recognition software that can verbalize such things still isn't always so accurate; that same tool of glancing at an emoji name is also open to neuro-divergent and other differently abled people that may have difficulty interpreting facial expressions and body language in real time.
Pre-emojis, there were so many times I misinterpreted a text, or had a text misinterpreted. Something that is obviously a joke or sarcasm or teasing with non-verbal communication, can come across as an insult without it. When somebody adds a wink emoji or similar at the end, it changes everything.
Emoji are fantastic at communicating tone and attitude alongside the text itself. They're not a 1-1 correspondence with non-verbal communication, or a perfect replacement, but they vastly improve the chances that something playful isn't misunderstood in a negative way.
And emojis can be especially dense with information in a way that can be pretty convenient. You can scan a 96x32 pixel block of 3 emojis to quickly gather information that would have required reading 1-2 whole sentences, potentially.
Emoji are also more 'casual' in a way that can be helpful. You can tap the 'heart' emoji on a message to a colleague or friend to express your gratitude or thanks for something without having to prevaricate over exactly what language to use to avoid seeming insincere or overly affectionate.
I think this might be one of the few points that this emoji use which you mention feels almost universal to me across all ages for the most part.
It just saves time if you can heart a message without saying I agree with you.
Additionally if the emoji itself is a reaction (say how Github/Discord heart emoji can work) then this is even better at times and how most of us sometimes use it because that way the conversation doesn't steer itself because they have nothing to respond to but they still see that you appreciated them. Win Win situation.
> Most words don't have especially precise meanings, context is everything
If someone wants words to have precise meanings, English isn't the best language for it. Sanskrit/Polish is. I was taught sanskrit during school and I think that a language having too precise meaning can actually take too much time to think and this just makes conversation take too long. It can also be that Sanskrit is almost extinct in verbal form aside from religious scriptures and rituals now so its just way too hard to learn the language even though we know fluent hindi. (FWIW It had 7 tenses IIRC and single/duo/plural for a single root verb)
I am not sure about polish tho but I am speaking this because I have only heard polish be also described as a language with more precise meaning and there was a HN post about it sometime ago in the context of AI.
And yes, many things can be communicated purely on emotion and no words, which in short form is also valuable
“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.
You don’t just put the same laugh emoji every time it’s funny…
It also doesn't help that we already had perfectly acceptable emoticon systems beforehand that were better than current emojis because they were customizable.
The early (modern) smartphone days were something else
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.
> I just tried this, sending from Verbs (iOS 5 supports emoji since forever), and yes, I can see the with no problem whatsoever :-)
I just tried this, sending from Verbs (iOS 5 supports emoji since forever), and yes, I can see the with no problem whatsoever :-)
Edit: completely swallowed!
suddenlybananas•8h ago
wildzzz•7h ago
TazeTSchnitzel•1h ago