Emoji

Emoji are extended characters that are built into mobile devices. There are hundreds of them: arrows, letters, roman numerals, pictures of food, building, transportation, flags, animals. And of course, happy faces, sad faces, crying faces. It’s easy to use them in AppStudio apps.

Each character has a number. While you might be used to more normal characters having numbers (“A”=65), the extended character set that unicode provides gives a lot more possibilities.

The characters are identified by string, in either decimal or hexadecimal.

Here’s our cheezeburger emoji in hex:

🍔

Here’s our cheezeburger emoji in dec:

🍔

Use these string characters wherever you could use a character. To make it bigger, change the font size of the control.

You can use the Emoji sample to explore the possibilities, or see the complete list in Wikipedia.

Use these to add some pizazz to your apps – pictures often work better than words and take up less screen space. And, by using the built in Emoji characters, you don’t need to include any extra image files with your app.

Remember to test on different platforms. iOS and Safari do probably the best job of including Emoji. Our Cheezeburger appears in full color. On an Android device, it’s a black and white image. On Chrome, it’s just a rectangle.