You could just write all your emails, Twitter posts, and Facebook updates in plain text, but there's not much fun about that, right? Today it's all about monkeys, airplanes, and cups of coffee, and they're all just a click away, thanks to emoji. This is how you enable them.
Although the old colon, underscore, and parenthesis smiley is universal, emoticons are very twentieth-century. You've probably come across emoji, the little icons that now appear on the web, in emails, and of course on Twitter. You may have even wondered how to spice up your own social networking posts with a cute Home Alone kitten.
Fortunately, both OS X and iOS support the use of emoji characters, and in both cases it's fairly easy to set up. That's how you work.
Enable Emoji on Mac
On the Mac side, if you're running OS X Mavericks, you can almost always access emoji in apps via a menu (or keyboard shortcut). Just go to it edit menu and choose Special Characters. This would normally show you a palette of special ASCII characters, but in Mavericks it's turned into a full range of emoji. They are divided into separate categories, such as People, Nature, Objects, Places, and Symbols.
To use an emoji, find one you like and click on it. If you're not sure if there's an emoji for something, you can even peruse the list of symbols by scrolling down to a search field. Once you've used an emoji, it will appear on the first panel, where all your recently used icons are kept.
If there are icons that you use over and over, you can also add them to a Favorites section, although this will require you to activate the larger character palette by clicking the icon next to the search field. There you can browse both emoji and ASCII characters; select an emoji and you will get a Add to Favorites button to see. When you click on it, it will appear in the first panel, under a header called Favorites. To remove an emoji icon from your favorites, just follow the same steps; the same button is now called Remove from Favorites.
Enable Emoji on iOS
On iOS, it's almost as easy. Just go to Settings > General > Keyboard > Keyboards and press Add New Keyboard. Scroll down until you come across an emoji and select it. Whenever you bring out the keyboard you will now see a globe icon to the left of the space bar. Press it to switch between the Latin keyboard and the emoji keyboard, or hold it down to see a menu of all installed keyboards.
Just like on OS X, the emojis in iOS are categorized, with the first panel showing you most recently used icons. Unfortunately, iOS doesn't currently support the same Favorites option as OS X, and there's no search function yet - so you'll have to remember where that sad panda is.
This is a freely translated article from our American sister site Macworld.com. Described terms, operations and settings may be region specific.
