Get ready to roll your eyes at hot dogs, because new emoji are coming.
The Unicode Consortium, the group in charge of designing and implementing those little pictures you use to add emotion to your iMessages, is rolling out Unicode Version 8 tomorrow, and it’s bringing 41 new icons with it.
You can check out all of the newcomers at Emojipedia, but here’s all you need to know: You can now express your love of unicorns and tacos entirely in pictures.
Here’s the full list:
Our friends chuckle when we text them a story using emoji. Fun little pictures rich in context and feeling, especially when we can make use of the smiling poo.
But that funny emoji story could also make a very secure password.
The British company Intelligent Environments has developed emoji security technology the developers say will be easier to remember and offer many more combinations that a four-digit PIN code.
If you’ve long found yourself unable to communicate effectively with your friends because of the lack of “bacon,” “shark” and “man in tuxedo” emojis, you could be in luck next year.
That’e because the Unicode Consortium, aka the Mountain View, California-based organization that standardizes characters and emoji across different operating systems — is set to add 38 all-new emojis to its Unicode 9.0 update.
Arriving in June 2016, they should find their way onto iOS not long after. Here’s what you can expect:
Emoji have gone from cute little pictograms only teens use, to a near-universal method of expression for all languages in about four years. Instagram has been tracking the use of emoji in posts and noticed an explosion of emoji after Apple added the keyboard to iOS in October 2011.
Today, nearly 60% of all Instagram posts in Finland use emoji, while users in countries like France, U.K., Russia, Italy and U.S.A. include emoji in 40% – 50% of posts. Using a tool called word2vec that reads through text and predicts the context around a given emoji, Instagram’s engineers have combed through millions of posts to decipher the true meaning of emoji.
Here are the most popular emoji and their definitions:
Instagram continues to play with the color wheel, introducing three new filters Monday the company says get inspiration from weekend outdoor adventures.
In addition to the filters, named Lark, Reyes and Juno, Instagram now allows users to include emoji on hashtags.
Since surpassing more than 300 million users in December, Instagram has added several new features to the photo-sharing app. It added five filters in December and last month, rolled out a new app called Layout, which allows users to combine multiple images in a single post.
This week: get’em while they’re hot! The Apple Watch is ready for pre-order, but the reviews are in, and they’re a mixed bag. Plus: what’s good in iOS 8.3 and OS X 10.10.3; Robert Baratheon makes HBO NOW a no-brainer; Samsung is up to their old tricks; the new Macbook didn’t benchmark well, but it might not matter; and things get weird in an all-new Get to Know Your Cultist!
Our thanks to Squarespace for supporting this episode. Squarespace 7 is live, and it’s their biggest update in years. Now building a beautiful website is faster and easier than ever. Learn more at Squarespace.com/seven and use code “CultCast” at checkout for 10% off any order.
Full show notes ahead!
Apple released big updates to iOS and OS X today, and among the changes is a whole lot of new emojis.
There are over 300 emojis added by Apple as part of an update to the Unicode standard, and most of them focus on racially diversifying the existing emojis we all know and love. There’s also an awesome Spock emoji for when you’re wanting the world to live long and prosper.
But the catch is that if you’re not on the newest iOS 8.3 and OS X 10.10.3, you won’t see these new emojis. Instead, you’ll see an alien or an empty box!
The Spock emoji is here — sort of. Apple added support today for the Vulcan salute emoji, the Star Trek-inspired emoji approved as a new Unicode symbol last year.
The new emoji, described by Emojipedia as “a raised hand, with the fingers separated between the ring finger and the middle finger,” is now visible to users on iOS 8.3 and OS X 10.10.3. However, you can’t actually pick the Vulcan salute out of the emoji character sheet just yet.
There’s no word on when Apple will officially add the Spock emoji to the keyboard, but you can start using it right now by following these quick steps.
Apple has released OS X 10.10.3 to the public. The update includes the all-new Photos app, which has been in beta for the last several weeks.
Hundreds of new emojis have also been added, along with improvements to Spotlight, Safari, Wi-Fi connectivity and more.
Snapchat used to have a “Best Friends” list that showed you who each of your friends snapped with the most. It was a weird, slightly stalkerish part of the app that was removed last year.
Now Snapchat has brought back a way to see top friends, but in a more fun way that relies totally on emojis (and won’t destroy your relationships). Here’s how to decode what the new Snapchat emojis mean.
Apple continues to tweak its emoji keyboard in the latest iOS 8.3 beta, the fourth iOS beta so far to make its way to developers to test and try out new features.
The new options organize the skin tone modifiers — which debuted in beta 2 of iOS 8.3 — into tap and hold menus, making things just a bit easier to utilize while streamlining the process as well.
In addition, all the yellow-colored Emoji people that previously had brown hair now have yellow hair, as you can see in the image below.
Apple is making some big changes to emoji with the inclusion of racially diverse characters in iOS 8.3, but the company has been hiding an emoji secret under our fingertips for years.
A startling emoji discovery was made this week by Peter Miller, who realized that the poop emoji is almost identical to the ice cream cone emoji — minus the cone and plus a splash of color. On Android, the poop and ice cream icons are pretty different, but it looks like whoever created Apple’s has been regurgitating old designs to save time.
You’ll never look at ice cream the same again. Sorry.
Apple snuck a major new emoji feature into its first iOS 8.3 beta, and we’re not talking about the racially diverse kind. Along with the new skin-tones for emoji added last week, Apple has included a potentially big feature with the new emoji keyboard that lets users deconstruct some emoji to discover their emoji combos.
By tapping backspace on emoji like KISS (man, man), users can reveal the combination of two or three emoji that represent the original emoji selected. The feature only works on some of the kissing and couple emoji, but it could be expanded to include more in the future.
Here are the different combos you can unlock:
Apple is making revolutionary breakthroughs in emoji technology with racially diverse emoji in iOS 8.3. For their next innovative addition, wouldn’t it be great if multiple emoji could be joined together as a single icon?
Designers Alexa Grafera and Louie Mantia teamed up to create a delicious new style of emoji called ligatures. The duo made a special set of ice cream fixins emoji that can be strung together to make the tasty-looking desserts found in Alexa’s ice cream emoji GIF above.
When you’re a company the size of Apple, sometimes you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
Having recently paved the way for racially diverse emoji by adding them to both Mac and iOS, Apple is now being attacked for the shade of yellow used for its Asian faces, which some critics claim is borderline racist.
Apple paved the way for racially diverse emoji to come to the Mac two week ago, and now with the release of iOS 8.3 beta 2, Apple has added access to 300 new emoji for iPad and iPhone users.
With iOS 8.3 beta 2 Apple now allows users to choose between five different skin tones for 60 different emoji. Switching between the different skin tones is just as easy as adding an accent mark to letters: simply press and hold an emoji to reveal the the entire palette of color options.
Here are some of the new emojis in action:
Apple’s promise to bring more racially diverse emojis to iOS and OS X has been nearly a year in the making, but in yesterday’s OS X 10.10.3 beta the company snuck in some code that finally paves the way for the emojis of the future.
While everyone else was playing with the new Photos beta, Sachin Patel noticed Apple made some big changes to the “Emoji & Symbols” palette that can be accessed from the Edit menu in most apps or by pressing Control + Command + Space. Along with renaming the Special Characters menu option Apple also added a new drop down arrow on all the human emojis that lets you select between five different skin tones.
With packages of dirty emoji filed under group headings like Teen Dream and Fetish 101, the artistically perverted designers at Flirtmoji are ready to help the masses up their sexting game.
Anatomically correct emoji, plus classic icons of the sexual revolution such as the rainbow flag and a banana wearing a condom, will make it easy for you to make yourself perfectly clear.
Many would-be game designers never make their games a reality because they don’t possess the artistic chops to create the graphics their game depends upon. But not being able to draw didn’t stop Ivan Grachyov, a computer science student at Moscow State University, and the resulting game might just be the next Flappy Bird.
The Russian designer’s creation? Emoji Cosmos, a game made of nothing but emoji!
Racial diversity has been a problem for emoji for years now, but the Unicode Consortium has finally proposed a new solution that will add more than 755 new character options to the little pictograms that have quickly replaced all our words.
Five new skin tones will added to the mostly white faces of the emoji character set, according to a draft for Unicode Version 8.0 that will hopefully get adopted pretty quickly to get, after Apple and others began to push for characters that reflect the diversity of its users.
Look, we all love sharing and getting nude photos of people we consensually want to see naked, right?
The problem, as this College Humor video notes, is that “some of you assholes keep sharing our nudes.”
While the big news is in the leaks of celebrity nude photos, even non-celebs want to be able to share sexy shots with their intimates. But if you keep sharing these ill-gotten gains, the amount of nudes out there? Is going to stop.
Check out the video below for more details.
It’s not that Apple’s emoji keyboard is necessarily bad, but it could be better. If you’re a hardcore emoji user, you know that it’s a pain to scroll through and find the perfect emoji in the moment.
Maybe you’re looking for the perfect funny face or food item for the conversation. To take your emoji game to the next level, you need a third-party keyboard called Emoji++.
Emojing has already replaced texting as the go-to zero-effort communication tool of youngsters everywhere, and all those emoji version of popular songs and TV shows are about a lot more elaborate thanks to huge unicode update.
250 new emoji have been added to unicode standard 7.0 that is used to standardize the presentation of text across different platforms like iOS, Android, and Windows, and while it’s still up to software makers to actually implement the new standards, you can expect them to land on iOS pretty soon.
There are a number of way to track emoji use on Twitter but this globe of real-time emoji tweeted across the world has me so spellbound I can’t look away.
Good thing too, because unlike EmojiTracker, it won’t cause a seizure.
When it comes to emoji, Apple supports everything from a smiling pile of feces to intricately detailed sunset landscapes. But if you’re looking for racial diversity there’s not a black person to be found and we’re not sure if the dude with the thick mustache is supposed to be latino, but if you scroll through the collection you’ll get the point.
The lack of racial diversity in emojis was not lost on MTV Act’s Joey Parker who decided to email Tim Cook about the controversy and was surprised to get a response the next day about Apple’s efforts to make emoji more diverse.
Here’s what Apple PR Queen Katie Cotton had to say about the emoji controversy: