Attention, emoji fans: there's an all-emoji keyboard for your MacBook

By Fusion Staff  |  April 6, 2015 | 10:09pm
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Emoji lovers are going to lose their over this: a new all-emoji keyboard, which replaces your QWERTY keyboard’s layout with eggplants, cats, martini glasses, and other beautiful emoji.

The keyboard is the brainchild of Disk Cactus, an Oakland-based art and technology studio. It’s a silicon-based pad that you can place over the keys of your 13’’ MacBook or MacBook Air. To use it, you just install a downloadable driver, and change your computer’s language, as you would if you wanted to type in Spanish or Korean. Then, you can type in emoji to your heart’s content.

Here is Real Future’s resident emojineer, Cara Rose DeFabio, with the hands-on review:

The emoji keyboard isn’t flawless; for one, a few of the emoji on the keyboard don’t match their on-screen counterparts. (If you push the snowman key, for example, the 100 sign pops up on screen.) For another, there are more emoji than keys on a keyboard, which make a little digging necessary. (You can use the shift/control/alt/command buttons to access the full range of emoji.)

Disk Cactus—which also makes art-tech objects like a wifi-detecting Walkman—is campaigning hard for their emoji keyboard, which is raising money in a Kickstarter campaign that ends this Thursday. (So far, it’s nearly 90 percent of the way to its $20,000 goal.) “We wanted a product that we could get attention with,” said George Sylvain of Disk Cactus. “We know that it’s maybe a little bit ridiculous.”

Cara Rose DeFabio is a pop addicted, emoji fluent, transmedia artist, focusing on live events as an experience designer for Real Future.

“I write about the future (Associate Producer at @ThisIsFusion).

I write about the past (publisher of #OGToldMe).

Oakland, CA raised me.”

 
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