The candidate list for Unicode 9 is taking shape, with the final list of new emojis scheduled for approval in mid-2016.
38 emoji characters have been accepted as candidates for the 2016 Unicode update, including Face Palm, Selfie, Shrug, Fingers Crossed, and Pregnant Woman.
Related Stories
Twitter has added a custom Coca-Cola-themed emoji next to instances of the hashtag #ShareaCoke:
Twitter will only be offering the feature to Coke and others as part of a package deal to its biggest clients that have already committed a certain amount of their ad budgets to Twitter. A typical move by big media companies is to offer sweeteners to major clients.
The San Francisco company worked with Coke for six months on the project and is currently talking to 10 of its biggest brand-name clients about getting in on the frenzy for winky faces and love-struck cats. A Coke spokesman wouldn't say how much the ad deal with Twitter was worth.
Snaps, a startup that aims to help advertisers and publishers navigate the booming mobile-messaging arena and consumers' growing predilection for using pictures over words, has recently raised $6.5 million in funding. It has already helped create digital stickers and emojis for marketers such as Burger King, Victoria's Secret, Sony Pictures Entertainment and the Houston Rockets.
You won't find that emoji in Unicode... yet.
Related: Sugar-Sweetened Beverages, Obesity, Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus, and Cardiovascular Disease Risk
The cheese on Google's version of the cheeseburger emoji is in the WRONG PLACE and that is problematic:
Responding to criticism about the placement of cheese on Google's version of the cheeseburger emoji, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that he would take a look at the issue immediately. "Will drop everything else we are doing and address on Monday :) if folks can agree on the correct way to do this!" Pichai tweeted.
Pichai was responding to author Thomas Baekdal, who pointed out the difference in cheese placement between Apple's and Google's cheeseburger emojis. "I think we need to have a discussion about how Google's burger emoji is placing the cheese underneath the burger, which Apple puts on top," Baekdal tweeted.
The tweet ignited a debate about where the different ingredients of a cheeseburger belong. Among all the different cheeseburger emoji variants offered by various tech companies, Google's is the only version to place the cheese below the meat, according to images of cheeseburger emojis from Apple, Google, Samsung, Facebook and others, as seen on Emojipedia. It's generally accepted that cheeseburger cheese should be placed directly on the meat patty for optimal melting.
🍔🍕🍖🍗🍟🍩 🏃💨 🇺🇸 💩🚽
Unicode 11 emoji candidates, scheduled for June 2018.
Also at Brisbane Times and New Zealand Herald.
Previously: Tweet Emoji 4 Pizza: #Epitome of #Convenience
38 New Emojis to be Introduced in 2016
Unicode Considering 67 New Emoji for 2016
Unicode 9.0 Serves up Bacon Emoji, 71 others, and Six New Scripts
Apple Urged to Rethink Gun Emoji Change
Unicode 10.0's New Emojis
Apple's New iPhone X will let You Control the Poo Emoji with Your Face
Emoji 12.0 brings us waffles, more diversity, suggestive "finger pinch" glyph
There's a push for more diversity with this new emoji release. We have emojis for deaf people in three genders (male, female, and genderless) and five skin tones, an ear with a hearing aid, people in motorized and unmotorized wheelchairs, prosthetic arms and legs, a guide dog and a service dog, and people with a probing cane. There are actually only 59 distinct new emoji types in this release, but everything that depicts a human comes in five skin tones and three genders, which pumps up the numbers. You can really see this with the "People holding hands" emoji, which is completely configurable for a total of 70 possible combinations.
The emoji that's causing the most buzz is "pinching hand." Emojipedia's example shows a thumb and pointer finger with a small distance between them, which could also be interpreted as a hand signal for "small." People are already coming up with, uh, "suggestive" uses for such a glyph, and if the actual implementations follow Emojipedia's design, the glyph could end up on the naughty list next to peach and eggplant.
Thank you, Emojesus. ✝
By the way, what happened to calling it Unicode 12.0? Maybe they'll call it that in June.
Unicode Consortium blog post. Also at Emojipedia and 9to5Mac.
Previously: 38 New Emojis to be Introduced in 2016
Unicode Considering 67 New Emoji for 2016
Unicode 9.0 Serves up Bacon Emoji, 71 others, and Six New Scripts
Unicode 10.0's New Emojis
Stink Over Frowning Poo Emoji at the Unicode Consortium
Related: Apple's New iPhone X will let You Control the Poo Emoji with Your Face
Google CEO Drops Everything to Fix Cheeseburger Emoji
Microsoft Briefly Left Holding the Gun Emoji
Battle of the Bagel Emoji
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Monday August 24 2015, @06:50PM
I guess we solved all the real problems finally then!
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday August 24 2015, @06:57PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 24 2015, @07:20PM
I'm too old for these emoji things, but what I really need is one that's a half-bare bum, trousers mid pull-down, for sending someone a moonie when I feel the need to insult them.
(Score: 3, Funny) by VLM on Monday August 24 2015, @07:25PM
I'm too old for these emoji things, but what I really need is one that's a half-bare bum, trousers mid pull-down, for sending someone a moonie when I feel the need to insult them.
Ah yes the famous goatse emoji, yes sir I have one right here for you
(O)
Looks just like it, eh?
How can a story like this not discuss the famous goatse emoji?
(Score: 3, Informative) by M. Baranczak on Tuesday August 25 2015, @03:54AM
(Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Tuesday August 25 2015, @12:44PM
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday August 24 2015, @07:26PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by VortexCortex on Monday August 24 2015, @09:37PM
what I really need is one that's a half-bare bum, trousers mid pull-down, for sending someone a moonie when I feel the need to insult them.
That's racist.
(Score: 5, Funny) by dyingtolive on Monday August 24 2015, @07:23PM
Well, since you asked, today's nightmare is building a validation script for approximately a thousand different json (and a small handful of xml) configuration files (with no published documentation) that determines functional correctness (as well as simply proving that they parse without exceptions) for a news delivery system that feeds just about every major player in the financial industry.
Or rather, I've been trying to figure out how to do that while having the guy behind me tell me the same old man stories he's been telling me for the last year and a half while the guy next to me keeps leaning over, looking at my screen, and then walking me through what's going on with his Facebook page. That's right, guy next to me: I'M TALKING ABOUT YOU.
You should ask me this again in about five hours. The answer will be something along the lines of drinking a beer and figuring out how to get the job where I'm responsible for adding unnecessary goofy shit to well-known standards. If there's not another position open for that, I might look into garbageman instead, just cause I think it might be nice to have a job where I have to deal with people's stupid shit a little less than I do now.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday August 24 2015, @07:01PM
Emoji in signature detected.
✨ 👽💨
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Monday August 24 2015, @07:29PM
Well, it's not like I went out of my way to put it there. Was a copypaste from https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/03/02/1856253 [soylentnews.org]
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 24 2015, @07:56PM
What they really need is to cut the crap, and make it turing complete already. I mean, screw postscript! Its old and unhip, just add more special unicode characters...
Also make everyone implement it...
(Score: 3, Funny) by TrumpetPower! on Monday August 24 2015, @07:56PM
I hope the "pregnant woman" emoji is suitably smug [youtube.com].
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 24 2015, @08:36PM
Funny? Definitely different. Do women think that way? I don't know what to think about that one.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Magic Oddball on Tuesday August 25 2015, @05:10AM
Like guys, we're not clones and don't have a hive mind, so you might as well ask if humans' favorite color is green. ;-)
Anyway, some mothers get a swelled ego out of being pregnant because of the massive amount of positive attention they get. I've seen some articles by mothers that said they felt the exact opposite: that it wasn't a big deal, they hated the attention, and in many cases really disliked the smugness their 'mother Earth' counterparts showed.
Then there's the childless & childfree women that think pregnancy is the most awesome thing ever — and the ones that think it's completely overrated. (Infertile women like me, of course, can fall into either camp.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 24 2015, @08:12PM
How is there *still* no manicule? They add all this other crap but not the one with hundreds of years history and proven usefulness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_%28typography%29 [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday August 24 2015, @08:14PM
Umm... from your own link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_(typography)#Unicode [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 24 2015, @08:19PM
👉 🖙 🖛 🖝 🖕
Hopefully some of these render for you, not all browsers support the full list : )
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday August 24 2015, @08:26PM
They all render for me, but possibly not in the intended way ;-) The last four are simply grey rectangles.
However looking up the first grey rectangle in the character table, I find "U+1F599 ". What was is intended to show?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday August 24 2015, @08:29PM
Err … reminder to self: Don't forget to preview!
What I found was: "U+1F599 <not assigned>"
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday August 24 2015, @08:20PM
Given that Wikipedia uses it (and it gets displayed quite fine on my system), I conclude that it is part of Unicode.
Indeed, the character table shows
with the alias name
Note that the very Wikipedia page you've linked to also has a section titled "Unicode" [wikipedia.org] which lists all relevant Unicode characters with code point.
So maybe before posting such wrong claims you should have informed yourself (for example by actually reading the very page you linked to).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Appalbarry on Monday August 24 2015, @10:55PM
a) Couldn't care less about Emojis.
b) Haven't used emojis, can't think of the slightest reason why I would.
c) Hard to believe that in less than two decades we've gone from people actually worrying about keeping sigs short and tight, to save bandwidth, to stuffing comic emojis into messages.
d) You don't need emojis. You just need words. And Intelligence. And, OK, I admit this is pushing things, some handle on spelling and grammar.
And finally, imagine what the world would be like if the money, resources, and labour that has been put into emojis was instead devoted to Tor, PGP, and similar initiatives.
(OK, the same can be said of cat videos.)
And yeah, Hey you kids! Get out of the Jello Tree!
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Tuesday August 25 2015, @06:21AM
You just need words. And Intelligence. And, OK, I admit this is pushing things, some handle on spelling and grammar.
...and capitalization. ;-)
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday August 25 2015, @06:41PM
I have located the only necessary addition out of the candidate emojis: 🥓!
Once that is rendering correctly, I believe we can declare MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by jmorris on Monday August 24 2015, @10:59PM
Why do I get the feeling this is just part of the collapse of civilization? Thought we had tried hieroglyphics a few thousand years ago and had figured out that it is a bad idea. Guess not?
Text is best when limited to a rigidly defined character set that can actually be typed easily and written unambigiously. For pictures, icons and such there is svg graphics or just bitmapped images. All this character set explosion does is force an upgrade treadmill to bigger machines to process Unicode and constantly updated software just to pick up the new glyphs. The ISO 8859-* character sets were entirely sufficient to deal with every non-asian language and perhaps we could have just told them, sorry your written language is simply incompatible with data processing. Keep some specialized layout software to process it as a legacy thing but don't inflict Unicode on the entire world just for them because as we now see it won't stop with them once you have UTF.
Heck, UTF-16 would have even been a reasonable compromise and it too would have encoded every currently used language.... but no, we had to go UTF32 so we could code ancient languages and a never ending stream of emoji in exponentially expanding combinations. And now 1GB ram is 'pathetically small.' These two things are related.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday August 24 2015, @11:13PM
Sorry about your lawn, jmorris!
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Monday August 24 2015, @11:16PM
I've got bad news for you. [unicode.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Monday August 24 2015, @11:28PM
I was going to post this too.
Emoji is just going back to the days of cave paintings.
Cell phones and Twitter are ruining our culture and language. Extreme word abbreviations, 150 character limits that restrict insightful, deep writing, and emoji that simplify the complex and rewarding process of distilling thoughts and ideas into words.
I don't think we (the human race) will ever lose formal English, but certainly the layperson will. This coincides with the loss of general education and the fall of democracy (which depends on an educated populace).
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @01:37AM
We're not heading toward idiocracy, we're living it.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday August 25 2015, @03:04AM
Yup. Ok, we don't have President Mountain Dew yet... but doesn't Trump get us pretty darned close? We have already went beyond "Ow, My Balls!" with modern reality tv. Bottom line is Mike Judge was a hell of a optimist to think his dystopia required freezing the protaganist to get him into the future.
(Score: 3, Touché) by MrNemesis on Tuesday August 25 2015, @01:28PM
Please remember that Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho was both a five-time ultimate smackdown wrestling champion and a porn superstar - thankfully Trump shows no sign at present of ticking either of those boxes.
"To paraphrase Nietzsche, I have looked into the abyss and been sick in it."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RedBear on Tuesday August 25 2015, @04:39AM
Translation: I'm American, so fuck everyone else. Also, I'm conservative, so I spend my life wishing the arrow of time flowed backwards.
It's one thing to be nostalgic for simpler times. It's quite another thing to be seriously expressing the idea that trying to adequately categorize any human knowledge and communication symbols beyond 0-9 and the English alphabet is something not worth doing. I'm bored of hearing about new emojis too, but that's a tiny fraction of the millions of very important and useful human communication symbols that are now encoded in the Unicode tables. The existence of Unicode isn't stopping anyone from continuing to use ASCII or ISO character sets where they are still perfectly adequate. It's not "exponentially expanding" either. At worst it's geometrically expanding. Besides a few new symbol inventions like emojis there isn't much left that still needs to be encoded into Unicode.
Translation: Relax. It's not as bad as you think.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by hankwang on Tuesday August 25 2015, @05:53AM
"It's not "exponentially expanding" either. At worst it's geometrically expanding."
Umm.. that's essentially the same thing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth [wikipedia.org]
Avantslash: SoylentNews for mobile [avantslash.org]
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Tuesday August 25 2015, @07:11PM
I may have gotten confused since middle school. I was thinking of some form of linear sequential growth vs. exponential expansion toward a asymptotic curve approaching infinity.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 3, Informative) by MrNemesis on Tuesday August 25 2015, @01:21PM
Age-old debate about CLI vs. GUI; GUI is more discoverable but CLI is great for better communicating info. Lots of people complain that linux/BSD/windows is too hard because "I asked for help with XYZ and they said do this gobbledeygook in something called a terminator that looks like the kind of thing haxX0rz use"... but it's much easier to communicate with cutting and pasting `doohickey frob WossName --config=~/.oojmaflip` than it is to say "OK, look for the hamburger... no, the other left... yeah, the one without sesame seeds... now spin the rehooglinator thrice widdershins and do a two-and-a-half-finger swipe from the chirping frog... no, the PURPLE chirping frog! What do you mean what purple? Are you colourblind?!". Part of why I've always preferred GUIs that have a CLI-backing (or equivalent batch file/scriptability - running a .reg file as opposed to instructing the user to footle about in regedit.exe for example) - the disambiguity makes the whole thing much less error-prone.
But... text is "difficult" (read: time consuming/expensive) to get right since it requires people well versed in the language, localisation (or is that localization?) and may not even be directly translatable into any given language. We've already seen this behaviour run rampant in the last decade of "appified" UI-design; instead of icon and text or just text we get some ginormous blob of an icon which may or may not serve as a visual metaphor; if you're lucky you may still get a tooltip. Examples include what I'm told is now called the "hamburger menu" alluded to above which is apparently the new standard for what used to be called "settings" or "preferences" and looks like three horizontal lines on top of one another. How it's meant to resemble a hamburger or settings (or why I should immediately think "hamburger" when I want to change something) I don't know but they're becoming ubiquitous. If you have a strong stomach I might suggest checking out some of GNOME's new, uh, UI paradigms.
I can't help but think of a passage from Stephenson's The Diamond Age where Nell is operating the matter compiler; the whole machine was operated by glyphs rather than text. A big part of her interaction with the Primer is learning how to communicate using actual letters and words so as to think of and express concepts that don't have a "mediaglyph" drawn for them. Reducing the commonly available vocabulary is always a concept I find worrying (cue Orwell quote).
I'm not sure I'd go so far as calling it the collapse of civilisation but globalisation has certainly pushed back on having text-based interfaces and the all-encompassing morass of UI dumbification/disasters/"improvements" certainly leaves me cold. But I'm wondering if the previous generation felt the same way when all us kids started putting :^) at the end of our new-fangled texts and emails.
"It's not the end of the world... but you can see it from here".
"To paraphrase Nietzsche, I have looked into the abyss and been sick in it."
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday August 25 2015, @05:23PM
Woah, there! I suppose UTF-16 makes sense when encoding text that's primarily an Eastern Asian language. Then there's that thing where the Windows world was all about UCS-2 (fixed-width 16 bit) for a while. Does anybody actually use UTF-32?
Personally, I'm very happy with UTF-8. Almost everything is encoded as one byte with the occasional two or three byte encoding when I go for punctuation that's not included in ISO-8859-* or if for whatever reason I need to enter an astrological sign. Did you know your entire post is UTF-8 (and anything else that's backwards compatible with good ol' 7 bit ASCII)?
I admit I'm not certain why there needs to be emoji.
The ISO 8859-* character sets were entirely sufficient to deal with every non-asian language and perhaps we could have just told them, sorry your written language is simply incompatible with data processing.
Just make sure you remember whether it was ISO-8859-1 or ISO-8859-5! Is that character supposed to be þ or ў? I suppose trial and error would reveal which variant it was.
From Wikipedia: [wikipedia.org]
ISO/IEC 8859-1 is missing some characters for French and Finnish text and the euro sign. In order to provide some of these characters, ISO/IEC 8859-15 was developed as an update of ISO/IEC 8859-1. This required, however, the removal of some infrequently used characters from ISO/IEC 8859-1, including fraction symbols and letter-free diacritics: ¤, ¦, ¨, ´, ¸, ¼, ½, and ¾.
The popular Windows-1252 character set adds all the missing characters provided by ISO/IEC 8859-15, plus a number of typographic symbols, by replacing the rarely used C1 controls in the range 128 to 159 (hex 80 to 9F). It is very common to mislabel text data with the charset label ISO-8859-1, even though the data is really Windows-1252 encoded. Many web browsers and e-mail clients will interpret ISO-8859-1 control codes as Windows-1252 characters in order to accommodate such mislabeling but it is not standard behaviour and care should be taken to avoid generating these characters in ISO-8859-1 labeled content.
Ugh, the Windows-1252 character set! That doesn't even mention CP437! How will I run ZZT [wikipedia.org] with either Windows-1252 or ISO-8859-*? What a nightmare. Shift-JIS! Wingdings! When does the madness end?!
Anyway, with ISO-8859-*, what should I do if I need a combination of characters that none of the 15 variants include? This can happen even if I stick to European languages. Speaking of ISO-8859-5, for some reason № makes it in, but © is nowhere to be found. No ¥, £, or ¢, either. Eh, probably only communists use ISO-8859-5.
I seriously doubt that 1 GB of RAM is considered too little these days because of Unicode, and I am certain that assigning codepoints to emoji (which may or may not ever be implemented in your font of choice) won't cause the demise of civilization.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @01:01AM
With litigation happy corporations, would owners of the Batman franchise try to sue you for using the Bat emoji on a shirt?