Modern Vespa

I am seriously considering replacing our old emoticons (many of which came from the original phpBB forum software) with modern Emoji. In an age of high-resolution displays, the old emoticons are a bit on the blurry side, the result of being upscaled by 2x or even 3x. I haven’t been able to find replacement artwork for the original emoticons -- at least none that stay true to the original design. Replacing them with standard Emoji (if Emoji can be considered standard -- they vary somewhat based on the whims of the OS platform) is one of the alternatives.

Here’s my first pass at mapping all of our emoticons to Emoji. My questions are:
- Are there better mappings?
- Can you actually see all of these in your browser of choice?
- What should we do about the ones where no reasonable mapping exists?

replace with 😀
replace with 🙂
replace with 🙁
replace with 😲
replace with 😳
replace with 😎
replace with 😆
replace with 😠
replace with 😛 or 😜
replace with 🤭
replace with 😫
replace with 👿
replace with 😈
replace with 🙄
replace with 😉
replace with ❗️
replace with ❓
replace with 💡
replace with ➡️
replace with 😐
replace with 🤡
replace with 🤓
replace with 🤣
replace with 🤢
replace with 😡
replace with 👏
replace with 🥱
replace with 👎
replace with 🤪
replace with 😴
replace with 🤬
replace with 😞 or 😔
replace with 😥
replace with 🤕
replace with 🤫
replace with 😘
replace with 🤨
replace with 🤦‍♂️
replace with 🍿
replace with 🛵

No Good Candidates:

I'm usually using Edge, and the old ones look better to me.

Yup, just looked on my fruity phone and the old ones get my vote there, too.
You must have been hella ahead of the times when you put those "old" emoticons in place!

I see all but one using Chrome on Android. I like the new ones better.

Seems like the new ones are much better images. I don't think the few changes do any great harm. I'd say you are on the right track with the upgrades.

But do the new ones move?

I mean, does the crier cry , the wha shake its head , the clown blow a horn ?
Does the laughing guy actually laugh?

I mean seriously, are we actually eating the popcorn or just looking at an image of popcorn?

It’s a fair point. But I’ll answer your query with a query of my own:

Do they need to move?

They look like crap here.

I personally think the new ones, though they are higher resolution, are also harder to make out at that size. They improve when enlarged (unlike the originals) but they are somewhat constrained by the text size that we use for posts.

What kind of janky-ass Windows machine are you using, Jim?

Without motion, where are we going?
Wax off....

Win 7. Necessary because of the VM of XP that I need for some other stuff.

The trouble with asking everybody's opinion is that you get - everybody's opinion.

OMG, are you the last holdout?

I’m used to it. When the response is highly fragmented, I usually just go with my gut instinct.

Isn’t MV already breaking stuff in your browser? I mean, we’re not exactly cutting edge, but MV is using at least 2010-era technology.

Can Win 7 count that high?
If I recall correctly Win 7 was running on some Intel chips that had math problems, no?
That might go back to the 1980's and I'd hate to think anyone thought I'd hold a grudge that long.

But those are the best ones!

Okay. I think the conclusion here is that Emoji aren’t quite ready for prime-time. While they are widely supported by current platforms, it is questionable whether they are really an improvement. Furthermore, they are not well enough supported on older platforms to make them viable.

So I am tabling this for now. Thanks, all, for your input.

I might try upscaling some of them, similar to what I did with Jim’s curmudgeon award. It is the original artwork, but rescaled to be pixel-y instead of blurry at a higher resolution.

I just think the current set has more personality. The newfangled emojis make me feel like I'm looking at a Teams channel at the office!

You took the words out of my mouth. I'm not usually a technology holdout by any stretch of the imagination. But I like our emoticons better.

Good on Safari.

So THAT’S what they’re called

a very handy reference for emojis is emojipedia.org

eg https://emojipedia.org/motor-scooter/

and if you click each then you can see how they looked on older versions of that brand/style

Noto Emoji is the default set on Android. It's available as SVG for fallback on older devices, and has reasonable alternatives for the existing emoji:

😁
😲

That said, I can already post emoji as-is, and can continue to even if you don't delete the old ones. [/url]

This is true.

yes Noto is default on 'standard' Android and Google Pixels.

Not standard on flagship phones from some big brands. eg not on a Samsung Galaxy S20

Yeah, not vibeing with the new ones. They look all right on Safari, but I suspect I'm likely to use them a lot less. But hey, maybe it's because I've been here too long.

On the one hand, it's nice to have things more standardized and up to date, especially with all the browser weirdness that already exists. On the other, I kinda like some of the animations on what's been here for ages.

I just pushed an update to the underlying graphics assets of some (but not all) of the emoticons. They should appear somewhat crisper now, but also more pixelated.

The animated ones are much harder to rescale, so they will continue to be a bit blurry. And in relation to the now-crisp ones, they seem even blurrier.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Interesting to see them together on one page, but they all seem to point the wrong way. For me, the scooter should follow the flow of the text -> -> -> ->

Is the hard part a graphics thing, or a coding thing? Maybe I've misunderstood.

Rescaled (hard-edged) MV gifs attached, if that helps...

MV animated emoticons 2x & 4x.zip
Description:		Download
Filename:	MV animated emoticons 2x & 4x.zip
Filesize:	184.32 KB

Does it still have the hand crank?

Oh, very nice!

The challenge was both rescaling and coding. With the rescaling done (thank you!) I can focus on finding a solution for the coding portion of the challenge.

The mechanism I use to serve either 1x or 2x image sprites doesn’t work well (or at all) with animated GIFs, but it appears there are newer mechanisms available to solve this particular problem.

Again, much thanks, this is a big help.

Didn’t see an equivalent for this one.

Personally I like the new emojis. They're more pleasing to the eye and a little bit more colorful. I am on my cell phone on satellite but I have no idea what kind of browser I'm using. All the Emojis are showing up perfectly.