No retweeting symbol on the iPhone
January 19, 2009 at 12:30 PM by Dr. Drang
Last week, I added a retweeting button to my fork of Twoot, Peter Krantz’s locally hosted Twitter webapp. I used the recycling symbol—♺, code ♺—as both the button and the prefix to the retweet, a symbol that seems to be gaining traction as the standard, replacing the written-out “Retweet” and the abbreviation “RT.”
Unfortunately, ♺ doesn’t show up on the iPhone. It’s apparently missing from the iPhone fonts and shows up as an empty box. You can see this by going to the Symbols page at ɯoɔ˙ʇxǝʇʎɯdıןɟ. Here’s what the symbols look like on my desktop computer
and here’s what they look like on my iPhone
It’s weird that of all those symbols, only the recycling triangle is missing. Others, like the snowman (☃) and the comet (☄), look different, but that’s just a stylistic variation from one font to another.
I don’t understand the omission. If Apple really needed to save space by cutting down on the number of characters in the fonts shipped with the iPhone, why did they include weird ones like the hot springs (♨)?
Anyway, to make my tweets iPhone-compatible, I changed the retweeting code to use the more prosaic RT prefix. Kind of disappointing.
