emoticons

Facebook recently added a list of emoticons to help you express yourself a bit more than text characters permit. The full list can be used in chat or private messages, and some of the less complex ones can be used in comments on wall posts.

Trying to use any of them in a wall post that you created (not commented on) will just end up looking like this:

Using them the way Facebook intended (for now, at least), looks more like this:

Here's the full list so you can express yourself to your friends:

Do … Read more

Simple typography that  started out as a colon, dash, and parenthesis has now grown up and blossomed into a massive array of features, moods, and gestures. Who would have thought that a happy face :-) could ever lead to rock horns \m/, or tongue-tied :-&, or just a simple heart <3?

Today, the emoticon turns 30.… Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Ho-hum. The iPhone 5 isn't going to wow anyone

- Don't kid your selves, Apple's dock connector change is awful

- Planning for winter: the worst accessory for your new iPhone

- "Tupac hologram" maker Digital Domain files for bankruptcy

- Emoticon creator says emojis are "ugly"

Bathroom break video: 770 pounds of eggs spill onto the road in China, gets looted… Read more

It's been 12 years since Chad Ruble's mother suffered a stroke that led to aphasia, a disorder that affects language processing but not intelligence. Most of the one million Americans who have the disorder experience difficulty both reading and writing, according to the National Aphasia Association, and Chad's mother Lindy was unable to recognize text and thus unable to use a keyboard.

So Chad did what any computer-savvy son should: he hacked a Kinect to help her.

After designing a visual dashboard of emoticons (happy, sad, angry, tired, etc.), each of which can be further qualified by an amount (expressed as signal strength -- one, two, three, or four bars), Chad says he turned to a Kinect, some gesture recognition code, and the simple OpenNI library for Processing to track the position of his mother's hand. A green arrow button sends the email and a red X resets the screen.… Read more

Yahoo Messenger (Classic) for Mac is the Mac version of the popular Windows YM, a communication app for anyone with has a Yahoo account. Considering that its Windows-based version is one of the most-used messaging apps, we were eager to see how the app performed. What we found were some nice features but nothing that really stands out over other messaging apps.

The application's user interface is well-designed and has all the control buttons available at a glance. What we liked is that the platform is finally opening its doors by adding support for MSN, Lotus Samtime, and LCS … Read more

Bridget Carey makes a full recovery from her trip to Austin, Texas, for SXSW 2012 and joins us on today's show to recap her first experience.

We'll also dive further into Michael Bay's plans for the next live-action reboot of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie and investigate the growing trend of companies asking potential employees for their Facebook usernames and passwords.… Read more

The latest in the everyone-sue-everyone patent war is an alleged infringement by Samsung and Research In Motion for installing emoticon shortcut menus on their mobile phones, according to tech news site Ars Technica.

A firm called Varia Holdings began the process of suing both cell phone makers on Thursday for using its "emoticon input method and apparatus" patent, reports Ars Technica. The company asserts that it owns the idea of pop-up emoticon menus, which let users easily insert a happy or frowny face without having to type out the characters one at a time.

"It is known … Read more

How you feeling today? (^_^)/ or (T_T)? Perhaps somewhat (=_=)?

If the above leaves you a tad (?_?), you're not up on your Japanese emoticons. But you can soon get up to snuff with Twikao, an app that automatically converts your mugshot into expressive symbols.

Japanese kaomoji (literally, "face letters") differ from Western smileys in several ways. For one, they're read vertically instead of horizontally, so that the brackets in the kaomoji above represent the sides of a face, and the symbols within are eyes and a mouth. For instance, a "T" is a watering eye, and (T_T) is crying.

Another feature of kaomoji is their wild expressiveness. The vertical form lends itself to a myriad of cartoonish little faces and combinations like \(^_^)/, a kind of mini-ode to joy. … Read more