{"id":8491,"date":"2016-08-11T00:01:50","date_gmt":"2016-08-11T07:01:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=8491"},"modified":"2016-08-06T10:19:14","modified_gmt":"2016-08-06T17:19:14","slug":"the-emoji-craze","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=8491","title":{"rendered":"The Emoji Craze"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Emoji<\/em> is a Japanese word that means <em>picture character<\/em>. It also has a keen association with the English word <em>emotion<\/em>. These tiny picture characters find themselves in text messages and emails to express thoughts that words alone cannot. If you&#8217;re like me and kind of out-of-touch with the kids these days, then let me explain that Emojis are insanely popular.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nHistorically, emojis first appeared on Japanese cell phones. This was about the same time that text <em>emoticons<\/em> began to appear &mdash; you probably recall the <code>:-)<\/code> characters that are considered Old School today. These are necessary tools, of course, designed so that you could impart some levity into text that could be misinterpreted.<\/p>\n<p>As emojis became more popular, computer nerds created standards. (That&#8217;s what they live for.) Eventually emojis were encoded and made available in multiple devices. They may look subtly different, but the basic concept is conveyed.<\/p>\n<p>Right now, the Unicode standard codifies over 1,000 emojis (<a href=\"http:\/\/emojipedia.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">Emojipedia<\/a>). Some people string together messages composed entirely of emojis. They can craft complex lines of text, poetry, and (naturally) dirty thoughts.<\/p>\n<p>Emojis aren&#8217;t available on every device and, as I wrote earlier, they don&#8217;t look <em>exactly<\/em> the same in each instance.<\/p>\n<p>On many Android phones, a special keyboard layout presents emojis characters. To access it, choose another keyboard layout, one of the symbol keyboards, which is covered in my <em>Android For Dummies<\/em> books. The emojis are typically presented by category, as shown in Figure 1. Swipe each category page left-or-right to view page after page of the various emojis you can insert into text.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_8492\" style=\"width: 560px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-8492\" src=\"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/emojis-figure1.png\" alt=\"Figure 1. Emoji options as shown on the Samsung keyboard.\" width=\"550\" height=\"244\" class=\"size-full wp-image-8492\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/emojis-figure1.png 550w, https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/emojis-figure1-300x133.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-8492\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Figure 1. Emoji options as shown on the Samsung keyboard.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Tap an emoji to insert it into the text, which can be in a text message, email, or anywhere else typing is permitted.<\/p>\n<p>And if you have trouble understanding an emoji in a message you receive, don&#8217;t hesitate to ask the sender what it means. Apparently people who use emojis are quite excited to share their favorites.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It took me 20 years to finally succumb to formatted email, so adopting emojis is going to take me a while.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[8],"class_list":["post-8491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main","tag-android"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8491"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8503,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8491\/revisions\/8503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}