Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Tech Review: Seinfeld Emoji App

If you'd have told me two years ago that Emojis would replace human speech as our primary form of communication, I'd have looked you straight in your beady little eyes and said 'yeah, that's a pretty accurate statement, I guess'. Much like the Vuvuzela is the voice of South Africa, Emojis have recently emerged as the language of the world, overtaking music due to it's steep learning curve and also because of all the noise. Unfortunately, with a new language comes new barriers and the impending dread at having to overcome said barriers. As glorious and convenient as the age we live in might be, we're slowly cultivating a forthcoming generation of mutes incapable of expressing the emotions that exist beyond a tap of the thumb and all the glory and convenience in the world doesn't change the fact that our reliance on crude imagery to convey a message is a bond we now share with four significantly worse-smelling lifeforms:

1. Cavemen.

2. Babies.

3. Shit-chucking orangutans.

4. Infants.

And you know what? Everyone is stoked and you should be stoked too, chilled out fellow Emoji user guy. What kind of dilapidated asshole doesn't want to incessantly bless their friends and loved ones with thought-provoking pages of high definition smirk faces and ambiguous turd emojis? Why string a bunch of ancient 'words' and sleep-inducing 'sentences' together when a random select from your recently used catalogue will say more than any 'chapter' or 'verse' could ever aspire to?

Literature? More like, SHITERATURE, right?



A couple of months ago the announcement of a Seinfeld themed Emoji dialect had the internet holding it's breath at the prospect of discussing our everyday minutiae with tiny pictures of Junior Mints and George Costanza's bulbous, balding cranium. Having taken the app for a test drive for about 30 seconds I've compiled a critical insight into it's working parts to help you decide whether or not it's worth your hard-earned cash ($0 at time of print).

Acquiring the app is easy enough:


Opening the app is also a relatively streamlined process:


The first hiccup I encountered was the seemingly pointless integration of a keyboard or 'snooze button'. Why would I download a Seinfeld Emoji app to input a bunch of stupid letters? Don't even think twice about tapping that Emoji tab:


Now it's just a matter of mashing the shit out of the Emoji symbols and watching as all your hopes and dreams come to fruition in the form of popular sitcom character icons:


My first project was a complete Emoji re-enactment of episode S07E06 or 'The Soup Nazi':
The second hiccup looks a little something like this. Since when was it ever deemed acceptable to 'share' a text message? Like I'm gonna call my friend and be like 'uhh, hey man. I like, built you a Seinfeld Emoji text message and shared it on Twitter so can you like, download Twitter and sign up and follow me so I know you got it? What's that? Why didn't I text it to you? I uhh, did. But it's not a text message as such, it's more an image in text form.' 
Congratulations, you've just lost your best friend forever and he's already got more Twitter followers than you:


The underlying issue and biggest setback of the Seinfeld Emoji app's otherwise pure intentions is that the app itself isn't a recognizable keyboard like the official Emoji app is. So instead of using the text message function to send pictures like a sane person, you've gotta go through a million other steps to send pictures as a text message. I personally know someone that went to send a Seinfeld Emoji response to a friend regarding the weekend's plans and by the time it sent the entire cast of Seinfeld had been deceased for five years:


In terms of presentation and it's application to everyday situations the Seinfeld Emoji app is everything I wanted it to be. All the sitcom's most memorable moments are represented perfectly in Emoji form and I even had to double check a few times to make sure I wasn't watching an episode whilst browsing through the characters. Unfortunately I feel like I was robbed of my $0 by it's roundabout interface and a very real fear that soon enough we'll all be sending .png files as text messages instead of the usual internal Unicode symbols and any hopes we had of getting one over those smug, shit-chucking orangutans will be gone forever.

In summation:

Don't - Use the app until it it's integrated into your device's stock language output.

Do - Use the Emojis to create comical reinterpretations similar to the ones I have below: