text+icons is a way to play with the icons of the Noun Project. You can type a message, and any words that match icons will be displayed as the icon. So you get a message thats a mix of text and icons.
I find the Noun Project pretty exciting – an intuitive visual language that can span many spoken languages. I like the idea of developing tools that will use the language, and can in turn potentially help the language grow. text+icons is exploring that idea.
The URL updates to reflect your message. You can write a little icon poem and send the URL to friends and they can see your text+icon creation when they open it in their browser. Here is one by james that I like:
my coffee addicted surfing robot sloth drives a jeep and loves physical-therapy and golf
and the accompanying URL: http://texticons.whichlight.com/#my&coffee&addicted&surfing&robot&sloth&drives&a&jeep&and&loves&physical-therapy&and&golf&
Shortened: http://bit.ly/oNEiB4
You can share the message via twitter too, using the share buttons below the input box. The URL is automatically shortened using bit.ly.
To make this, I used bottle to retrieve the icons and javascript to visualize it all. Bottle is running using Passenger. You can see the source and remix the project here. There is also a pretty simple API to the noun project icons that I wrote. At the time this was made, I could not find one, but there will probably be one presented in the coming months by the Noun Project.
You can get an icon of a particular noun as an img or a json.
For the json:
just search the [noun] with http://texticons.whichlight.com/api/[noun], and you’ll get back a json with {‘status’ : ‘ … ‘, ‘data’ : ‘…’} where status will be ‘Success’ if there is an icon, and ‘Fail’ if there is not. ‘data’ will return back the icon link if there is an icon. It just retrieves the first icon if there are multiple ones.
For the img:
just search the [noun] with http://texticons.whichlight.com/icon/[noun] and you’ll get an img.
COOL!
