Google redesigns its emoji to be more universal and authentic
Google is tweaking 992 of its emoji designs to make them more "universal, accessible, and authentic," the company announced today. The new designs will arrive this fall alongside Android 12, but Google says they'll also be available on older versions with apps that use its Appcompat compatibility layer. They're also coming to other Google platforms like Gmail, Chrome OS, Google Chat, and YouTube Live Chat this month.
[...] [The] bikini emoji no longer looks like it's being worn by an invisible person, and the face mask emoji now shows a face with its eyes open. Google says it made this change to reflect the fact that masks have become "a universal way of showing kindness to others" rather than a symbol of someone being sick.
[...] If you're wondering why we've seen such a flurry of emoji news over the past couple of days, it's because this year's World Emoji Day [landed] July 17th.
Related: Google CEO Drops Everything to Fix Cheeseburger Emoji
Microsoft Briefly Left Holding the Gun Emoji
Unicode Consortium Adding 230 New Emojis in Emoji 12.0
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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
The pistol emoji ― 🔫 ― is being phasered out, or turned into a water pistol:
Google is the latest company to ditch the pistol with a new emoji update for Android users. The switch to a bright orange and yellow water gun, rolling out now, mimics changes made by Apple, WhatsApp, Twitter, and Samsung over the last few years. That leaves Microsoft as the only major platform with the realistic handgun emoji. True, Facebook still uses it, but a spokesperson for the company confirmed to Emojipedia that it would also be replacing its gun emoji with a toy water gun. The Verge has reached out to Microsoft for comment.
[...] Ironically, Microsoft initially displayed the gun emoji as a toy, but changed it to a revolver in 2016 as part of its emoji redesign project. With Google's (and Facebook's) latest move, Microsoft's gun emoji puts it at philosophical odds with the other giant tech companies based in the US where gun violence is a major concern. As we previously noted, in 2016 Apple successfully pushed to remove the rifle icon from the standardized collection of emoji.
However, later on the day The Verge's article was published, Microsoft revealed that it is jumping on the trend as well:
We are in the process of evolving our emojis to reflect our values and the feedback we've received. Here's a preview: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DbqXVKBU0AAdXLk.jpg
Previously: Apple Changes "Pistol" Emoji From Revolver to Toy Water Gun
Apple Urged to Rethink Gun Emoji Change
Twitter Changes Revolver Emoji to Water Pistol Emoji
Related: Kids Are Facing Criminal Charges for Using Emoji
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: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 19 2021, @10:02PM
They got one that looks like Pavlov?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Snotnose on Monday July 19 2021, @10:09PM (11 children)
Way to waste your time/money/resources on something that means absolutely nothing.
I don't need a turd vs a turd with flies to make my opinion known.
Why shouldn't we judge a book by it's cover? It's got the author, title, and a summary of what the book's about.
(Score: 4, Funny) by looorg on Monday July 19 2021, @10:15PM (1 child)
But now you'll be able to actually see the flies or steam rising from the turds. Just imagine the immersion, it will be like it and you are right there next to each other.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 19 2021, @10:46PM
Sure, you may, but do you know how it will look to whoever sees it?
Fine tuning such an imprecise way to communicate seems pointless.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 19 2021, @10:23PM (1 child)
The possibilities are endless! - https://xkcd.com/1813/ [xkcd.com]
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday July 19 2021, @11:49PM
I want to see vomiting vomit.
Unrelated but related: "You can't dust for vomit."
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday July 19 2021, @10:37PM (4 children)
Your mileage may vary, I suppose. The internal chat I use at work lets you tag comments with emojis and we use this feature for quick little polls, like: "How many of you still need assistance from IT?" Instead of getting a flood of yes's or no's people just tag the original question with the thumbs up emoji or the thumbs down and it shows you a nice little count of how often each one was used. (If you've ever seen the current incarnation of the 'like' bar in Facebook it's virtually identical except it accepts ALL emojis.) The supervisor can read the count to verify all the employees have responded and the ones that DO need help are nicely enumerated and easy to track down. Nice, simple, and efficient.
I'm generally fine with expanding the emoji set, it actually does help with text-based communications despite some feeling that it's corny, but I'll concede that if you asked me how I'd feel about my browser's address bar supporting emojis I'd suddenly do a complete about-face and warn you of security bullshit that door opens.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @11:25AM
Before emojis existed. In fact I'm pretty sure lots of applications had/have that paradigm for all sorts of options.
Seriously though, fuck Emojis. They don't properly scale to all font sizes. The colors violate theming/customization in terminals and graphical user interfaces, and given the wide variation in artistic vision for them, they're even less 'legible' than some of the more esoteric english fonts (are there many weird stylistic fonts for other languages?)
Point being, this scope creep on thousands of emojis is just making a mess of text processing, filtering, and even the intention of a message.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @01:28PM (2 children)
Emojis have nothing do with automatic counting of responses. Email and chat surveys that automatically tallied up the yes/no, Y/N, agree/disagree,etc. responses have been around since the 90s, heck probably since the 80s on some networks.
For 1000 years the English alphabet has contained around 26 characters, give or take a few and those 26 characters were good enough the write eloquent poetry, Shakespeare's plays, and novels that convey the details of the setting with such clarity you can visualize it in your mind. It was used in writing to express a character's feelings, mood, and emotional state with such detail that the reader would know now just how the character felt, but more importantly the degree as well . From the words read, reader could empathize with the protagonist and despise the antagonist.
Now in 2021 what do we have? Adults that think replacing a few words with one bobble-headed caricature is "advanced communication". It's not.
As soon as I get a new computer I rip the emoji fonts out. They just seem so childish and juvenile for adults to use.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @01:51PM (1 child)
Not quite, there used to be more letters, but point taken. It's a bit of a joke when people say ye old rather than the old as English used to have a letter that looked a bit like a Y that was pronounced like TH. And there was a letter looking like F that was pronounced like S.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @09:57PM
The long S [wikipedia.org] is not juſt "pronounced like S", it is the letter S. Roughly, the "s" ſhape is uſed when it occurs at the end of a word, and moſt other inſtances ſhould be written as "ſ", unleſs a capital S is required (which is uſually juſt written S). But there were many exceptions and writing was leſs ſtandardiſed when the long S was common than it is today.
The long S somewhat ſurvives today as the firſt part of the German ß ligature.
I ſeem to recall there is a character in at leaſt one Diſcworld novel who actually ſpeaks with an "f" wherever a long S ſhould be uſed.
I have a reprint of a wonderful 19th century verſion of Euclid's Elements which uſes the long S, it never gets old reading about ſquares and iſoſceles triangles.
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 19 2021, @10:38PM (1 child)
Glad to see that I'm not the only person who thinks emojis are a total waste. Unfortunately, the silly classes of people seem to be hellbent on creating a new language based on emojis.
Who knows - maybe this infinite number of monkeys banging on an infinite number of keyboards will figure out some of the finer points of ancient languages?
Probably not. The monkey who discovers something will be drowned out by the million closest monkeys banging out nonsense.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 19 2021, @10:43PM
💩🚽😂
(Score: 1, Redundant) by aristarchus on Monday July 19 2021, @10:12PM (1 child)
So this is what they put all their AI Ethicists to work on?
(Score: 3, Touché) by helel on Tuesday July 20 2021, @04:36AM
Well it's pretty clear they don't want them doing work on the ethics of AI...
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 19 2021, @10:15PM (2 children)
Just search, no SJW bullshit.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @12:22AM (1 child)
Wow! Dumbfuck incel triggered hard by some emojis.
That's pretty funny!
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @01:31AM
Back to your safe space, little snowflake, the whole world doesn't share your brainwashed viewpoint.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 19 2021, @10:26PM (2 children)
lmao!
cultural marxist Jew rats.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @02:43AM (1 child)
What's next, a pregnant man emoji? Oh, wait. [yahoo.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @04:57AM
Hey, I dated a girl in high school that had a better moustache than that!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 19 2021, @10:55PM (12 children)
[clap-clap] [thumbs up] [heart] [smiley]
n/t
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @12:01AM (2 children)
[steaming pile of shit] [pink haired tranny] [stinking pike of shit with flies]
... at least that's what GMail's auto-type recommended.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @12:24AM
Well, GMail's auto-type is pretty good at suggesting things based on your personal preferences.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @04:18AM
[dinner plate] [pile of poo] & [coffin]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @12:40AM (2 children)
[Clapping Hands Sign] [Thumbs Up Sign] [Heavy Black Heart] [White Smiling Face]
(Those are the official names, and I am aware that they are not those colors in most fonts.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @01:39AM
Yeah, ...but my emojis look loads better than yours.
[kiss mark] [donkey]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 21 2021, @12:53AM
I found the reason for that deep in their standard [unicode.org]. "White" means an outlined shape regardless of color, such as a "Red white heart" would be a red outline of a heart. "Black" means a filled shape regardless of color, so a "red black heart" means a filled in shape of a heart colored read. "Heavy" means bolded, "light" means unbolded. Other colors used are suggestions, but other ways of differentiating between the same glyph with different suggested colors can be used.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @02:27AM (2 children)
👌👌
🤡🌍
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @02:51AM (1 child)
Oh my god! How could this be allowed to happen?!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @03:48AM
[facepalm]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 21 2021, @02:35AM (2 children)
Even if you describe them, that doesn't make hieroglyphics legible. Are you trying to say something about VD resulting from taking pleasure in phalangeal penetration from a loved one?
You might consider expressing yourself more eloquently using the non-pictorial squiggles many of us know as "words".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 21 2021, @03:03AM (1 child)
But, my friend, you have understood my comment perfectly. By pretending to applaud, approve, love and be happy about the effort Google is making, I was at the same time demonstrating how equivocal such attempts at language-by-hieroglyph actually are, and that improving their depictions (or in my post, virtualizing their depiction) does nothing to fix the defects in the that communication strategy.
So you have arrived where I had intended, hopefully having had a chuckle and an interesting mental journey. Now how could I have been more eloquent?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 21 2021, @03:13AM
...and the trouble with words is that sometimes, in editing them, some get away from you...
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Tuesday July 20 2021, @05:48AM (1 child)
It's all about politics. This is amply demonstrated by the emoji of the guy who ate too much [emojipedia.org]. How many people have felt a crying need to have an emoji of a pregnant guy? Why, there must be...tens of them. Why would an international standards committee add something like this? Progressive politics, i.e., so the participating companies can virtue signal.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @11:28AM
Once all the major languages in the world were in unicode they needed to self-perpetuate themselves instead of going 'Our job is done, we're disbanding this committee until sometime in the future when other languages typesets need to be added or corrected.'
As a result we have the current mess of unicode, where a few legitimately needed typographic characters get appended to the end of existing character sets while it mostly gets stuffed with 'filled' characters in the form of emojis to help perpetuate the need for the Unicode Standards Committee, so they get to fly places, bill food, etc all on their employer or the organization's dime.
(Score: 2) by Ingar on Tuesday July 20 2021, @09:09AM (2 children)
The arrow in the knee.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @12:39PM (1 child)
Are you an adventurer like me?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @02:03PM
I used to be