It would be funny to bring that to books. We thought about making a button you could hit that would make Oyster look like Microsoft Word like they do for March Madness. Unlike a lot of products, our biggest days are Saturdays and Sundays, but when we added the web reader, you see it spiking on weekdays because people are reading during work. This is an app that people use on their phone constantly, and we see the actual activity spiking during the week at lunchtime, and through the evening and peaks around midnight, and on the weekends it’s pretty sustained. It might even be higher on the phone in recent months over the iPad. It’s hard to get the data on this with Android, because, what is a tablet? But between iPhone and iPad, it’s a 50 / 50 split. That’s the first thing we went to publishers with when we started talking about the differentiation of Oyster, that we can provide the best possible mobile experience. We’ve always been really big believers that the device of the future for books is the phone. Where are people reading more, tablets, phones, or on the web? Of course, what’s true for me may not be so for the broader world.įrom Ellis Hamburger’s Verge interview with Willem Van Lancker, co-founder of the Oyster book app:
#Willem van lancker full
Make sure to check out Bosker's full piece at the Huffington Post as it's full of interesting tidbits regarding all things emoji.I’m sorry, but I’m just not reading books on a phone. "To be honest," he said, "when there are hundreds of these to be made, some of them were made in 30 minutes." Van Lancker said Apple consulted the Japanese originals, but the look of each emoji was ultimately up to its designer. But with so many emojis in play, some designs were impressively whipped together in a half hour. Van Lancker further explained that in coming up with Apple's set of emojis, designers at times took a look to Japanese emojis (where the trend first began) for inspiration and reference points.
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"It's a lot like spoken languages," he said.
#Willem van lancker android
Willem Van Lancker, a former Apple employee who designed hundreds of emoji for the iPhone, said he was dismayed to find that on Android devices, his icons' counterparts "almost to mean a different emotion." Interestingly, Bosker was able to get in touch with Willem Van Lancker, a former designer at Apple who helped craft many of the icons in Apple's emoji set. A full comparison of every iOS emoji and its Android counterpart can be seen here. Of course, Apple has a long history of rich and detail-oriented icons.Ĭase in point, below is a closer look at how emoji icons vary across different platforms, courtesy of Emojipedia. It's hard to dispute that Apple's offerings are more elegant and artistic than what's available from Google and Twitter. I suppose it's much easier to appreciate Apple's own emoji set once one sees what the competitive landscape looks like. In one example, Bosker directs us to Unicode Character U+1F48 which encapsulates a picture of a dancer. But the manner in which those descriptions are brought to life by artists are anything but uniform.īianca Bosker of the Huffington Post recently took a look at how common emoji templates differ across varying companies. You see, emoji designs are rooted in text descriptions laid out by the Unicode Consortium. Forget old-fashioned emoticons, Apple's emoji characters let iOS users send all sorts of quirky, helpful, and flat out weird icons with just a few taps.īut what may not be readily apparent to iOS users is that emojis sent to non-iOS devices typically look different than they do on iPhones and iPads. Once Apple added Emoji keyboard support back in iOS 5, messaging for iPhone users was forever changed.