Android Emoji Fix

Inspiration

I was tired of seeing a blank space where there was supposed to be an emoji because my phone did not support the emoji.

What it does

The app displays a notification which gives users a shortcut to view and send all emojis supported by Unicode 8.0.

How I built it

When the user taps "render" the app takes the last item from the phones clipboard and renders it using iOS 9 emojis. When the user taps "keyboard" the app opens up a dialog which the user can use to type emojis and then copy and paste them where ever they wish.

Challenges I ran into

Java uses UTF-16 for it's char data type. This means every Unicode character can by represented by one or two bytes. I didn't know how to figure out if a character will be one byte or two. I solved this problem by first encoding the String in UTF-32BE, this ensured that every character will be represented as four bytes. Then I used sub arrays of length 4 to recreate a list of characters in a String representation.