Twingbats
Remember Dingbats? I don’t remember if I had it on the Atari ST or not, but I know that I used it a lot when I got my first Mac Plus. It was a font of nothing but pictures like stars ★ and chess pieces ♚ and music ♬. I don’t know the history behind the font, but the symbols are now implemented inside fonts that support Unicode.
The problem is that typing these glyphs isn’t easy. If you know how to type the codes into Windows, or use the Special Characters menu on Mac OS X, it’s easy for you. However, not many people know how to use these tools or can remember the Unicode number. After spending so much time on Windows, I decided a few years ago to make a little Wordpad “cheat sheet” with the Unicode characters I needed, and their codes if I need to tell someone how to type them in. This got cumbersome after a while, and with everything moving to The Cloud, I started working on a web-based solution that I could bookmark.
Currently, the best reference I found for Unicode characters is here. However, there’s way too much there to sort through and I just wanted the core characters I’d need. I don’t need all the math symbols or characters from languages I don’t speak, just the fun ones for email and Twitter.
I wrote Twingbats to be very simple: the Unicode characters are organized in groups. If you click/roll over the character to highlight it, you can then copy it to your clipboard and paste it where you need it. If you simply hover over it, a tooltip will display showing the decimal and hexadecimal numbers needed to display that character using HTML. If you click the character, it links to fileformat.info which gives you all the information you need on that character.
To use Twingbats, simply click the link below. If you want to save it permanently, you need to drag it to your toolbar. If you bookmark the URL after it’s been displayed, you’ll save the page without the proper format of the miniwindow.
Twingbats is not exclusive to Twitter, you can use it on any app that supports Unicode characters.
I have some ideas for improvements to Twingbats. Rob Blatt gave me one which I’m going to try and implement after SXSW. Even though I’ve been working on this on and off for months, I rushed to finish it before I left for SXSW.
References:
The Javascript link code is from Clipmarks.
Window sizing code is from boutell.com.
Mac users may want to learn how to use the Special Characters menu.
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esamenoi
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Starman
