I read an article about ‘whimsical’ texting icons which are now available on the iPhone to help express a greater range of emotions than the normal smileys.
I think these emoji are graphically ghastly. I can’t imagine Jobs letting Apple use them.
Today’s invention is therefore an emoticon upgrade.
Messages of up to 140 characters would have an emotional tone specified (the one in the image is ‘surprised’). This might be automatically extracted from the text itself.
This emotion is used to select an appropriate layout for the words themselves (so that ‘surprise’ will cause some of the words to be arranged in such a way as to indicate raised eyebrows.
