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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.
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(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.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(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
💩🚽😂