Carl Jonard Technically Still Has a Blog

For those who don’t know, emoji refers to a ridiculously wide assortment of bizarre  little emoticons that are widely used in text messages in Japan.

Smiley faces are just the beginning—there are 25 pages of these! (Yes, that is a smiling turd.)

The iPhone 2.2 software update introduced support for emoji, but unfortunately, they aren’t available for people in the U.S.

All that has changed now, my friends. Behold, the simple 3-step process for enabling emoji on your iPhone:

1. Download the free iPhone app Spell Number. It’s an almost entirely useless app that spells out numbers in the form of words.
2. Type in the number 91929394.59. This will activate an easter egg in the app, which enables emoji on your iPhone.
3. Go to Settings > General > Keyboard > International Keyboards > Japanese and flip the switch next to Emoji.
4. In all your other apps, the keyboard will now include a little globe icon. Tap that to access all the emojilicious fun!

(This is feature is hidden because Apple has cracked down on apps whose sole purpose is to activate emoji.)

There are a few caveats: The emoji will only display correctly on other people’s iPhones. If you try to read them in an email or online or an another kind of phone, they’ll probably come across as blank boxes or gibberish. But if you have friends with iPhones, super happy fun time is go!

Maryann Bruce, passenger of US Airways Flight 1549:

Ms. Bruce said she had survived disasters before, including the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, where she worked then. “I must have nine lives,” she said. “I was vacationing in Honolulu and had to be evacuated for a tsunami. I was skiing in Denver and had an avalanche. I flew into the eye of a hurricane. I was at the big L.A. earthquake.”

NOOOOOOOOOO!!!! THAT’S NOT TRUE! THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE!

CUPERTINO, California—December 16, 2008—Apple® today announced that this year is the last year the company will exhibit at Macworld Expo. Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, will deliver the opening keynote for this year’s Macworld Conference & Expo, and it will be Apple’s last keynote at the show.

A raging controversy regarding one bullet point in the WALL-E Wikipedia article:

20081105_Chicago_IL_ElectionNight1888, originally uploaded by Barack Obama.

Looks like a MacBook Air & an iPhone 3G.

Barack Obama’s new official website as President-Elect is up today at change.gov. To be honest, I’m a little disappointed. The Obama campaign had some of the best, most consistent branding and design I’ve ever seen, and it looks like they’re not really building on that as they move forward.

The layout is fine, functionally. It looks like they’re probably starting with the campaign website’s templates.

But the Obama campaign’s beloved typeface Gotham is almost nowhere to be seen on the new website.

It’s been replaced by a generically Presidential serif font that I haven’t been able to identify yet.

There’s a trace of something that looks like Gotham here, but the numbers don’t look right:

And I think the tiny text in the button here might be Gotham, but it’s hard to say at this size:

The anti-aliasing on the small Times New Roman-y text looks pretty bad here.

Nitpicking aside, it is pretty cool that this website even exists, and it bodes well for government agency websites in the future. Even though this design doesn’t quite live up to the exceptionally high standards of the Obama campaign, it’s still better than the sorry state of most existing government websites.

The more that I look at the website, the more the new look grows on me. I can see why they’d want to establish a distinction between the campaign and actual governing. The podium placard at the press conference today was consistent with the new branding:

2008.11.08 – 538 First Press Conference-6, originally uploaded by Brett 538.

The electoral map will look exactly like the results of this poll conducted two years ago, plus or minus 50 states: