You downloaded iOS 8. You checked out the hidden features. We gave you some suggestions on cool keyboards to try, but ugh — who wants to use words? Keymoji is here to phase out the pesky letters from all your digital communication.
It’s basically an autocomplete text-to-picture tool. Before, when life was hard, coming up with a clever series of little cartoon characters required swiping — oh dear god so much swiping — between the different categories until you found the perfect way to illustrate your chosen turn of phrase.
Now, you start entering in text — say, “happy birth” — and keymoji will offer a selection of individual or grouped emoji that kind-of-sort-of correspond. Tapping on the suggestion will slip it into your convo, and your pal will be none the wiser that you didn’t curate it yourself. It also works literal and conceptual one-on-one translations: “So” pulls up emojis for “song” (a music note), “sour” (a lemon), and “soccer” (a fútbol).
The app also offers the opportunity to create and label your own custom combos, which seems useful if you’ve already got your standard emoji go-tos and want a fast shortcut.
That Keymoji exists — and so quickly — isn’t a surprise. Emoji are great, and people love ’em, even if a world sans syntax and grammar is full of loneliness and poop. Founder Octavio Herrera told Re/Code: “Hunting and pecking for an emoji — it just seems like a waste of a cool way to communicate.” Maybe so, but there are definitely people out there who pride themselves of being emoji-maestros: Will futzing with their composition powers enable their habit or encroach on their creative sensibilities?
However: Half the fun seems to be in the random stuff that pops up. Which signals lots of good times to come with QuickTypers in all its glorious incarnations. [Re/Code via @davewiner]