Emoji in Notes
If you haven’t heard of emoji, they are basically a popular set of emoticons used extensively by users of mobile phones in Japan. Even though you wouldn’t know it, they exist on iPhone and iPod Touch, but they will only become available to users on a Japanese cell provider. At least, in theory… 
Now, it’s recently been reported by Erica Sadun that Apple is scouring through the App Store to remove apps that allow a user to enable emoji, or at least requiring developers to remove the “feature” from their respective app. I believe the basic reasoning is that emoji are using non-standardized sets of UTF-8 characters, and are not consistently implemented between devices and platforms (in fact, Windows and OS X don’t recognize them at all without the use of user-made plugins for Firefox, for example).
This has made it a bit tougher to find an app that will let you enable emoji. In fact, the developer of one such app, the free “Spell Number”, was required by Apple to remove the easter egg which enabled emoji without jailbreaking.
Users with a jailbroken iPhone or iPod Touch can enable emoji easily, by simply modifying a line in /User/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Preferences.plist on the device. They could simply issue the following command in Terminal (which is an app available only on jailbroken devices):
plutil -1 KeyboardEmojiEverywhere /User/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Preferences.plist
However, many people (including myself) don’t want to jailbreak just for this. So, here’s how you enable emoji on your iPhone or iPod Touch without jailbreaking:
- Update: I have removed the details after request from Spell Number’s developer. As per this blog post at the website of Spell Number’s developer, please send an email to emoji [at] waterworld.com.hk - you will receive an automatic response with information. I can assure you this will give you the information you need. Feel free to contact me if you do not have any luck with the above method.
- Update 2: The developer of Spell Number put up a tutorial on his website explaining how to enable the emoji. Check it out!
Keybd showing Intl button
Done deal! Go into an app such as Notes or Mail and start typing. You will see a new keyboard icon at the lower left (international keyboard set icon). Click it and you have a nice selection of emoji (emoticons) available to you. Notice in most of the emoji categories you can scroll left/right to view more emoji.
Note that these emoji are really only going to be visible on iPhone or iPod Touch. I believe the SoftBank emoji character set is implemented on iPhone, so I guess if you send an email or SMS to someone on SoftBank provider in Japan, it may show up for them as well.
I had written here before to share the info as much as you can, and I still recommend you do so - however please refrain from posting the information on publicly accessible blogs, so as to keep this hidden gem from being taken away too soon.
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I said DON’T POST THIS ANYWHERE.
We were supposed to remove the easter egg, but we just changed the number…BUT IT SAID DONT POST THIS ANYWHERE!
waterworld.com.hk
Hi, sorry man, I did not see such a message, however I didn’t read through the entire app desc. Want me to remove this post?
You should delete it! or else “Emojiman” may get in trouble!
Indeed. Emojiman and I have discussed over email, and I’ve removed the vital information – instead users are now asked to email a certain email address.
Hi, cool post. I have been wondering about this topic,so thanks for writing.