Feb 10 2014

A long time ago, I wanted an emoji gem. So I set out to make one. Turns out, emoji are damn complex. Emoji Licensing was one of the results. Who’d have guessed the hard part of making a gem was the legal part! Next up was that the ‘emoji’ gem was waaaay out of date: it was a library for converting between Japanese telecoms’ emoji, which was important years ago, but not now that they’re just UTF-8. So I contacted the owner, who graciously gave me the gem.

Well, after doing the legal and social work, it turns out that some other people were interested in the idea as well! In the end, I didn’t write very much actual code, and Winfield really stepped up and made the code side happen.

So today, I’m very happy to have just released version 1.0 of the emoji gem, and to officially hand off maintainership to Winfield. Thanks for all your hard work!

Install it with

$ gem install emoji

And find the source on GitHub: https://github.com/steveklabnik/emoji