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take for example the Iminent google chrome plugin, it let's you add smilies to youtube comments, facebook chat, gmail etc...

I just don't undertands how, didn't just who ever made the software can do this type of thing?

Seth Keno
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    In some cases the supplied posting/messaging tool will allow you to configure a file on your system which it will pick up with each message. Then it is quite easy to set up a background task to update that file with changing text at, say, 5-minute intervals. You can do this, eg, with Mozilla Thunderbird's email tool. – Hot Licks Jun 29 '14 at 12:23

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Unicode has had "smileys" (a.k.a. emoji) for a while, and web applications that support Unicode (sometimes referred to as UTF-8) can accept them (and international characters) in places like text input boxes. So the programs in question treat these like any other character.

I'm not sure what Windows' equivalent is, but on the Mac, there's a "Show Character Viewer" item in the keyboard menu which lets you search for and insert these characters. To enable it, go to the Keyboard panel in System Preferences. In the Keyboard tab, there's a checkbox for Show Input & Character Viewers in menu bar near the bottom. Check it and you get a small country flag icon in the menu bar, which is the keyboard menu.

Mike DeSimone
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