Nowadays, Facebook is becoming a fad and there is probably no one who is unaware of this social networking site. One of the many features that Facebook has introduced is the floating Chat bar which is neat and has options to set our status to offline unwanted people by grouping them into categories. There are many built-in emoticons for Facebook but many are unaware of it and use just traditional messaging emoticons like :-) ,:-( and so on. I am one of those many people who are lazy to remember all the shortcuts to use them.

Pros:
I have tried my level best to reduce the number of lines of code and the installer version of the file is just 884.2 KB. (Thank the Teacher who taught me the basics of functions and File-handling operations in C++! :-) ) Also the software takes up only little memory resources to run. I have included all the emoticons (26 emoticons) which I know so far in Facebook and please do leave a comment if you know of any other emoticons that I haven’t included. The software’s GUI has a transparent window and always stays on top of other windows unless you hide it. The software also has “Ctrl+Shift+Z” shortcut key to Hide/Unhide it.
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Facebook Chat Emoticons v1.0 |
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Cons:
One of the major cons of this software is that it works only on Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. I have tested the software on both Windows XP and Windows Vista. The only problem I encountered was the requirement to disable the User Account Control (UAC) in Windows Vista. Since this is a third party software and custom scripted, Windows might not recognise it as a valid application and I guess that might be the reason why the software doesn’t work with UAC turned on. Even though Microsoft claims it to be a security feature, personally I think it’s very troublesome and a good Anti-Virus solution will do the job instead of annoying dialog boxes always popping up asking to confirm the operation. I have even written an article on how to disable the UAC long back! Also a few of the emoticons might not work as expected, but not always. I have tested all of the emoticons myself and didn’t work only twice.
I had plans to include much more features like custom emoticons, a Messenger styled wink or maybe ‘Nudge’ option too but right now my programming knowledge limits me to do so. (No blame on the Teacher this time! :-) ) As I mentioned earlier, this is the release of my first software, so excuse me of any errors.
Also thanking my friend ShazzZ who gave comments on how to improve the software during the scripting time.
Update (24th June 2011):
Found an error with the program, so I had to slightly modify the code at the expense of its quick performance. On the light of the tests I have done so far, the error seems to crop up occasionally only for two to three emoticons and the rest all are working as expected. I was almost ready to release it for download but it’s only at the last moment that I found out the error. Now it works quite well on Windows XP and Windows Vista (only with the UAC disabled).
If anybody encounters any problems or have any suggestion on improving the software, please do let me know. If I get time, I am ready to improve upon the software, taking your opinions into consideration and release compatible versions for other browsers too. Healthy criticisms are always welcomed!
If you liked this software please consider "liking" it below. :-)
Update (11th July 2011):
I really wondered why I still held on with this software without really publishing it even though I gave away the download link of the software. One thing which made me stay back was the main two issues with the program:
- It only worked with User Account Control (UAC) disabled.
- Some emoticons occasionally didn’t seem to work.
I could fix the second error up to an extent but considerably affected performance. All these kept me away from sharing the software until I got an assurance from someone who said that everything was working fine as expected. Also I knew it was quite rude from my side too to ask all who wanted to use the software to disable UAC.
And now, I have fixed all these issues. It now works fine with UAC. Also I have tested all the emoticons and ALL of them are working really fine. Once upon to stress on, the software works on almost all versions of Internet Explorer and latest versions of Mozilla Firefox only.
If anybody encounters any problems or have any suggestion on improving the software, please do let me know. If I get time, I am ready to improve upon the software, taking your opinions into consideration and release compatible versions for other browsers too. Healthy criticisms are always welcomed!
If you liked this software please consider "liking" it below. :-)
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