Emo-what?

Emoji are picture characters that are very popular in the Japanese mobile market. One analyst even specifically cited the lack Emoji support as one of the factors contributing to slow sales in the Japan market…crazy, but true!

Originally meaning pictograph, the word literally means e “picture” + moji “letter”. The characters are used much like emoticons elsewhere, but a wider range is provided, and the icons are standardised and built into the handsets.

I read a blog recently on how to get the set of Emoji icons for the iPhone for free, so I thought I would share that…

How do I get my hands on these?

Simple, just follow the instructions below. Beware though that these only work from iPhone to iPhone, so people with other handsets will not benefit from this

1. Check your iPhone has firmware 2.2 or 2.2.1
2. Download the ‘Spell Number‘ app from the App Store.
3. Launch Speel Number and enter the following code 91929394.59.
4. Close the app without doing anything else.
5. Open Settings > General > Keyboard > International Keyboards >Japanese > Turn the Emoji “ON”
6. Now when you start writing a text message there should be a little globe there. Clicking on this globe opens up the Emoji icons.

There’s lots of icons on there (461 apparently), so enjoy!

Taking a screenshot of your iPhone is one of the many nice little features that has been built into the 2.0 firmware update.

It can be useful for capturing something you need for later or in my case I have used it for taking a great quality photo of my iPhone that I uploaded to show how my webclip looks on the iPhone. (example here)

All you need to do is:

1. Hold down the Home button.
2. Whilst holding it down, press and release the Sleep/Wake button (on the top). The iPhone will click like it does when taking a photo and will then flash. Your screenshot has now been saved in the Cameraroll folder in your photos. Easy

We have all seen favicons grow in use so much in the last few years. Even animated favicons are being used more and more. But while using my iPhone today, I noticed that you can save a bookmark of a website from Safari to your home screen. That’s pretty cool, but then I noticed there was also the little icon that came up as a preview.

I then wondered if it were possible to create a little icon like the favicon to put in place of that, much like the ones the apps have on there already. A quick google found that I could indeed do this….and here’s how.

1. Create a 57 x 57 png of the icon you want to be displayed and name it apple-touch-icon.png
2. Upload that to the root of your site much like you would a favicon.

Now when you navigate to your site on your iPhone and choose to ‘Add to home screen’ after a couple of seconds, there will be the icon you uploaded. What’s more it will automatically add the nice little corners and wipe to the icon for you How simple is that?

An example of what my site looks like saved to the iPhone can be seen to the right.