Emoji Lite for Mac

Smileys and similar emoticons have been part of our messages for a while, but the advent of smartphones allowed for a move from the old character-based smileys to a full graphics version. Emoji Lite is an app for Macs with MacOS X or later that provides a wealth of graphical emoticons for texts, e-mails, and any other text-based app. Similar to the iPhone version, Emoji Lite offers a considerable number of emoticons that are easy to call up and deploy in text.

Emoji Lite includes about 450 emoticons in a variety of categories. Choosing the right one is simply a matter of hitting the option to call up the emoticons, then choosing the one to put in your text. As long as the reader has the Emoji Lite software installed, the emoticon will be properly displayed (otherwise a text representation is shown). Apart from the usual face emoticons there's a ton of additional images you can call on. Passing emoticons from Mac to iPhone and iPad was no problem, either direction, which allows the Mac to catch up with the Emoji app used on those mobile devices.

Emoji Lite worked flawlessly in our tests, and we love the variety of emoticons available. Having used the iPhone version for over a year, we found that having them available on the iMac and MacBook completed the circle of devices. While we had problems embedding emoticons in Facebook, Emoji Lite worked well with all other text apps we tried. We suspect the ease of use from Emoji Lite will have you embedding emoticons (no matter how much you used to hate the text-based images) quite often!