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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: 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.