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Smiley Toolkit created by Adam Grant
"When I was at Hotline, I had an idea for a smiley generator. Hotline the program supported chat rooms, so I wanted to make a graphical smiley editor in which you'd have a bunch of slider controls with which you could make a smiley exactly expressing your mood. It would have a palette of preconfigured smileys, to which you could add your own with the editor. Then drag-and-drop might be used to insert the smileys into chat or newsgroup messages. The user could also have quick control-key access to smileys in the palette, (e.g. cmd-shift-S-4 might insert the fourth smiley into the text). Implementation details: Since there's a Hotline client mediating both sides of the communication, each smiley can be described and transmitted as a sequence of perhaps six numbers, although it appears to the user as a graphic of a human face with curves indicating eyebrows, eyes, nose, mouth, and perhaps forehead creases and dimples. The applet at right is a simple example of what I'm talking about. Each slider may affect many of the curves on the face but a single emotion of interest to the user. Several improvements immediately suggest themselves: more emotions, smarter interactions between the emotions (like ligatures in a typeface), dimples and nose - dimples might only show up if certain emotions passed a predefined threshold value. If anyone is interested, drop me a line and I'll send along the source. Feel free to link to or copy the applet for use elsewhere." |
