Show HN: Emojiboard, a JavaScript keyboard for web forms (opens in new tab)

(github.com)

4 pointshughstephens10y ago5 comments

5 comments

5 comments · 2 top-level

hughstephensOP10y ago· 2 in thread

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>.

kinduff10y ago

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?

hughstephensOP10y ago

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!

reach_kapil10y ago· 1 in thread

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

hughstephensOP10y ago

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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5 comments

5 comments · 2 top-level

hughstephensOP10y ago· 2 in thread

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

kinduff10y ago

What could be a good solution for this?

hughstephensOP10y ago

reach_kapil10y ago· 1 in thread

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

hughstephensOP10y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse