

Show HN: Emojiboard, a JavaScript keyboard for web forms - hughstephens
https://github.com/hughstephens/emojiboard

======
hughstephens
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>.

~~~
kinduff
Great plugin. I created something similar but for Twitter
([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/emojitwitter/figia...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/emojitwitter/figianejgcfhaodnghfcbhdjdhkbofbe)),
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?

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

~~~
hughstephens
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).

