15by7

January 28, 2013 9:17 AM

15by7
A simple web toy for creating absurdly-crude tweetable pixel art. Warning: squinting may be required.

There are snags limiting its compatibility (Twitter desktop web interface doesn't render line breaks, and some OSs/apps use fonts that have wonky Unicode block characters), but hopefully people will have fun with it. As an experiment, I did almost all of the development on an iPad using Textastic.

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Role: Creator

posted by malevolent (9 comments total)

Dang, it breaks on my MeFi profile page. D=
posted by carsonb at 5:24 PM on January 28, 2013

Hey that's slick! FWIW I tried playing around with Unicode line breaks: U+2028, U+2029, and U+0085 but couldn't trick twitter.com into displaying them as line breaks.
posted by Nelson at 7:12 PM on January 28, 2013

Nelson - The only way to force a line break in the desktop site is to force wrapping, e.g. with some extra wide non-breaking spaces, but then it wouldn't look right on mobile/apps. Judging from yesterday's stats, I perhaps should've gone that route though.
Given Twitter's drive to ensure Tweets are displayed in a standard way, it's odd that the desktop site & widgets treat line breaks differently from everything else, maybe they'll add support one day but I'm not holding my breath.

carsonb - It'll probably look OK if you only use the two least dense characters, as I did above. In many fonts, for some reason the most dense block is much wider (in Android 4 the least-shaded block is missing altogether!).

I'm filing this project under "Nice idea ruined by reality".
posted by malevolent at 2:50 AM on January 29, 2013

Fuckin' reality, man.
posted by carsonb at 11:17 AM on January 29, 2013

This might still be useful on the Blue, though.
posted by JHarris at 11:56 AM on January 30, 2013

Just found a way to put line breaks in tweets on the web: U+000a, ascii 0x0a, the Ctrl-J character. (Did something change, or did no one try this before?!) Example. Displays as line breaks on the website, the iPhone app, even the ancient official Mac client.
posted by Nelson at 1:46 PM on March 13, 2013

Ah, this is a recent change on Twitter.
posted by Nelson at 1:56 PM on March 13, 2013

I noticed the change last night, it's great to have a project come back from the dead.

I posted a complaint/feature request in the Twitter developer forums at the end of January, focusing on the inconsistency (as they're so keen to establish control of how tweets are shown), so who knows, perhaps someone actually reads posts and took notice.
posted by malevolent at 2:26 AM on March 14, 2013

Updated the URL on this post per OP request.
posted by jessamyn at 9:10 AM on April 4, 2013