emoji - page 7

Apple doubles down on emojis in latest iOS 8.3 beta

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Selecting just the right skin tone is now even easier. Photo: Buster Hein/Cult of Mac
Selecting just the right skin tone is now even easier. Photo: Buster Hein/Cult of Mac

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.

Holy crap! Startling emoji discovery will taint your view of ice cream

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Photo: Peter Miller/Twitter
The proof is in the pudding, as they say. Photo: Peter Miller/Twitter

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.

iOS 8.3 reveals emoji combos with a simple backspace

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Emoji combos can be revealed on iOS 8.3 with backspace. Photo: Buster Hein/Cult of Mac

 

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:

Meet the delicious future of emoji: ligatures

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Ligatures. Photo: Alexa Grafera
Ligatures are the tastiest emojis yet. Photo: Alexa Grafera

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.

Why Apple’s new emojis aren’t racist

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Selecting just the right skin tone is now even easier. Photo: Buster Hein/Cult of Mac
Emoji are now racially diverse. But the controversy's not over just yet. Photo: Buster Hein/Cult of Mac

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 adds 300 racially diverse emojis to iOS 8.3

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300 new emoji are coming to your iPhone soon. Photo: Cult of Mac
300 new emoji are coming to your iPhone soon. Photo: Cult of Mac

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 paves way for racially diverse emoji in OS X 10.10.3 beta

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Apple added an emoji skin tone modifier to OS X. Photo: Buster Hein

 

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.

Dirty emoji make sexting simple (NSFW)

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Sexting made visual with the help of Flirtmoji. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Sexting gets visual with Flirtmoji. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

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.

This addictive iOS game is made entirely of emoji

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What it says on the tin. Photo: Ivan Grachyov
What it says on the tin. Photo: Ivan Grachyov

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!

Your keyboard is about to get 755 new racially diverse emojis

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Emoji are about to get more racially diverse. Photo: Buster Hein/Cult of Mac
Emoji are about to get more racially diverse. Photo: Buster Hein/Cult of Mac

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.

This is why you should stop sharing nudes right now

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Here's the best reason to stop sharing nudes you don't own. Photo: College Humor
Here's the best reason to stop sharing nudes you don't own. Photo: College Humor

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.

Finally, an emoji keyboard that’s better than Apple’s

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Screenshot: Alex Heath/ Cult of Mac

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++.

Your keyboard is about to get 250 new emoji

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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.

Apple Says More Racially Diverse Emoji Are In The Works

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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:

Make Your Contacts List More Visual With Emoji [OS X Tips]

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emoji contacts

Visuals are extremely helpful, especially when you’re trying to differentiate between a lot of text information.

Consider your contacts list, which could have hundreds, maybe even thousands of people’s information in it. Sure, you can break them up into groups and just search for the contacts you want, but there is a neat way to find what you’re looking for using the Emoji keyboard that’s now included in OS X (and iOS).

How To Replace Text Emoticons With Emoji [iOS Tips]

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Sure, you use the Messages app to send along SMS and iMessages all day long. You know how to use Emoji’s, too, with a tap on the international keyboard button on your iPhone.

I bet you even use regular text emoticons, like semi-colon and parenthesis to create a wink, or colon and parenthesis to create a smile.

But have you ever tried to have your iPhone turn your text-based emoticon into an Emoji? I bet you haven’t.

Activate Emoji And Other Special Characters In Mavericks [OS X Tips]

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Emoji Shortcut

In case you missed it, OS X Mavericks came out yesterday and it’s free. If you’ve downloaded the latest operating system from our fine friends in Cupertino, then you’ll be able to check out this neat little tip.

We all love emoji, right? Those cute little emoticons came into vogue for iOS a while back, and then were rolled into Apple’s mobile operating system as a special keyboard. They’re also avaialable in OS X Mavericks, and you can pull them up with very little effort, in almost any app.

Access Special Characters In Any App With OS X Mavericks Beta [OS X Tips]

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Messages Emoji

Don’t forget that the OS X Mavericks beta isn’t a final version—it’s meant to be used by developers to ensure that their software will work with Apple’s latest and greatest. With that disclaimer in mind, let’s check out a new little feature in the beta.

Many apps have had access to special characters before, like iChat and Messages. You’d simply click the little smiley face, for example, and get all the fun emoticons Apple has provided.

If you wanted to type a special character in a text document, though, you’d have to remember that Option-8 is a text bullet, and Option-K is the degrees symbol, and Option-2 gives you the Trademark symbol.

Now, though, in OS X Mavericks beta, you can see visually what special characters are available to you across all applications. Here’s how.

Mastering The iOS Keyboard: Enable (And Disable) Emoji [iOS Tips]

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Emoji Keyboard iOS

With iOS 5, Apple included Emoji as a standard keyboard option, obviating the need for separate Emoji apps (previously the only way to get the cute characters on your iOS device). The Emoji option continued in iOS 6, adding a bunch of new cute characters, as well as some welcome gay and lesbian avatars as well.

If you haven’t enabled Emoji yet, or you want to disable it for whatever reason, read on.

Apple Cracking Down On Emoji Apps

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Apple’s cracking down on apps that have no other purpose but offering emoji — that cute emoticon character set popular with some text messengers — and are kicking developer’s apps out of the App Store if they do nothing else. The reason? iOS 6 already does emoji.

How To Play Chess Or Checkers Via iMessage [Image]

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emoji

Last week we discovered the funniest way to play Connector Four on an iPhone. It’s silly and slightly painful, but completely awesome in a nerdy way. Now someone’s raised the stakes and figured out that you can also create games of Checkers or Chess using emoji. If you’re really bored trying to figure out how to celebrate Columbus Day today, now you have an activity that’s guaranteed to take up a few hours of your time.

 

Source: Reddit

The Most Painful Way To Play Connect 4 On Your iPhone [Image]

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connectfour

There are like 50 billion games on the App Store and a lot of them have Game Center integration so you can battle your friends at Angry Birds, or Temple Run or Tic-Tac-Toe or whatever. But if you want to see how much your friends really love you, try playing them in a emoji game of Connect Four. It’s painful and kind of tedious and you have to remember to play with virtual-gravity, but it’s also totally awesome, in a dumb way.

Every Single Feature That Is New In iOS 6 [Mega-Guide]

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iOS 6 drops today!

We’ve all been itching to get our hands on iOS 6 since it got its first unveiling at WWDC back in June, and today, three months after that announcement, the software finally gets its public debut. Apple’s packed a ton of new features into this update, including some major new features like Map and Passbook, plus some enhancements to existing apps and features, such as new Siri capabilities and a VIP inbox in Mail.

Apple’s been promoting some of these features on its website, but there are tons you may not have heard about. With that said, here’s your comprehensive guide to everything that’s new in iOS 6.