Kickstarter

Now everyone can finally see a full layout of all the emoji we've done so far: http://genshin.org/poe/cheat_sheet

Please note there are a few incorrect entries for the categories. We'll be fixing that and improving the cheat sheet soon. Our resident app developer Nazuki and web developer SnowSunny have also starting work on a proper entry, parsing and conversion tool for web platforms. After that is finished Nazuki will begin working on modules for Android and perhaps iOS (it doesn't look like Apple will allow it but we're still waiting on a response).

The cheat sheet will be updated regularly as we add and improve. Please give us criticism on what emoji you would like to see improved and how you think we should improve them. Particularly all $5 backers who chose an emoji please look at the emoji you chose and tell us if you want it improved.

Now that the cheat sheet is up and we've processed most of the $5 level we'll be sending out the remaining surveys. The creation kit will be shared soon as well. Thanks everyone for your patience.

It's another Friday! We're still alive and we've been busy! We moved all pre-compiled static assets into a separate repository found here: https://github.com/Genshin/PhantomOpenEmojiStatic

Tohyama has created many more emoji and we're working on getting a nice cheat-sheet view. We would have had it up today but we ran into a little snag. All the images can of course be viewed in SVG by downloading POE core or in various sizes of PNG from POE Static.

In other news we're starting up a set of tools for web developers to easily incorporate emoji - including in-page converters and input pallets. We'll provide packages for Rails and Node as well as instructions for how to incorporate them into a static site. If anyone is interested in providing other packaged versions please contact me directly. Tools for mobile platforms will follow.

I've got more news on animation as well. Our next kickstarter will be for creating a new standard library and tools for Animated PNG (APNG). We've been in direct contact with the author of the current leading APNG conversion tools and we'll be working together. I'll include more details for those who don't know, but long story short Animated PNG is like a really high quality version of Animated GIF. Unfortunately it was shot down as a standard by some people in the standards body that had their own format [MNG]. Then MNG never took off because it was too complex and we've been stuck with GIF when there was a perfectly good replacement available since *2004*! After being rejected Animated PNG has been the rebel without a cause of image formats - shunned by society but really cool because it wears torn jeans and a leather jacket... er, I mean it has a full alpha channel and gracefully degrades to standard single frame PNG on non-compliant decoders. Animated PNG support is already available in Firefox and Opera, and there are plug-ins to enable it in Chrome and IE as well as a patch for Chromium which has not been accepted as the maintainers have not seen enough usage. I want to use APNG for animated emoji because GIF just doesn't offer high enough quality. So I say we animate the web and get APNG into common usage and provide easy to use cross-platform libraries and tools to let everyone start using it right away.

I'll update everyone as soon as we have the cheat-sheet up. Again, I'm really sorry we didn't finish it yet but you can still grab all the emoji from the link above.

Hello everyone! We're still alive!

However, this week was Golden Week (a week where many holidays happen to bunch up) and everyone went to take a long overdue rest. A few emoji were added though and I did take a little bit of time to clean up a bit. We'll be doing our best to have a cheat-sheet styled overview of all the emoji soon - there's just too many additions to post individually now.

Expect to see a lot more movement next week as Tohyama gets to processing your requested emoji full time.

Our campaign has succeeded and we're off processing your requests. Tohyama has made so many emoji in the last few days we're considering how we'll put them up to show everyone.

We've sent out the surveys for the $1 and $5 levels and have started processing the results. Custom emoji will come shortly after. The Creation Kit will be made available as soon as possible. We're considering options for distributing the Creation Kit in a way that will allow backers to always have the latest version. If anyone has any suggestions for how to keep a private but shared archive of image source files and assets that is widely used please give us a heads up.

In other news I finally got animation working. It's a long story (which may prompt another campaign in and of itself!) but basically: GIF is an awful format, Animated PNG (APNG) is not a standard but is awesome and already widely used and available [and falls back gracefully to standard PNG], MNG is a standard but is awful [as in barely usable] and nobody has implemented it. So in the end I chose to write the converter to output: APNG [.png extension], MNG, GIF and a folder with individual frames and animation information in JSON and XML. This way there's an animation format for everyone. It still needs some tweaking but it's "working". I'll have samples up soon!

As soon as we catch up with your orders/surveys and have everything going we'll refine animation, complete the gemoji converter, and move on to our new long term plans to fund creation of all the emoji and get emoji support on everything we can. More details on those plans soon in a backer only update.

OH! And we've got custom Pizzas coming in! Expect those to be added soon as well!

Again, thanks to all backers for making this possible. We'll be sure to keep rewarding you in as many ways as we can.

We're coming down to the end of our campaign. As I write this we have less than 19 hours. It doesn't look like we'll reach our $7.5k or $10k stretch goals but don't worry! We're going to do more emoji than we've promised AND we have a few ideas to fund the remainder.

I'd also like everyone to know that we're going to try and get system level support and emoji standard compatibility on as many systems as we can. We have some custom Android and iOS widgets in the lineup that will be free (GPLv3) for OSS projects and reasonably licensed (flat rate one time fee same price for individual or organization + get an emoji made!) for non OSS. For desktop we currently have a GTK tool/widget in the works and we'll create a QT version and a Cocoa version if there is enough demand. All developers who backed the project will have the amount of their pledge -reduced- from the license fee.

And please don't forget that all backers will receive every emoji related tool we release for free!

I'd just like to thank everyone for supporting us and for making our campaign a success. It feels great to be able to contribute to the Open Source community and your contributions have enabled us to do that. All in all this project has been and will continue to be a lot of fun for us. I will do as much as I can to see emoji properly supported on every platform. And I hope that Phantom Open Emoji will be what enables system, application and service developers to provide that functionality.