💬 The Wrap
Hello and welcome to emoji action season. Kicking off around World Emoji Day in mid-July, we tend to see emoji updates from major vendors just about every month.
Apple and Microsoft have both previewed their new emojis recently, and Google has just begun rolling out their major emoji update in Android 9.0 “Pie". Expect to see more from Facebook and Samsung later in the year, too.
On this month's podcast I chat to Judy Safran-Aasen and Mike LaJoie from the team who handle emoji at Microsoft, and we discuss a number of the articles mentioned in this very newsletter.
A lot of the articles this month are from news or announcements on World Emoji Day itself, but if you're looking for something quicker, here's video summary of the day.
📰 News
🥧 Android 9.0 Emoji Changelog
Android Pie is rolling out now and it's supporting the latest emoji updates. As always, a number of tweaks too. Yes - this is the "vegan salad" update.
🍏 World Emoji Day 2018: First Look at Apple's New Emojis
Coming to iOS "later this year" (my guess would be iOS 12.1 around October or iOS 12.2 around November - but that's just speculation) these previews of new Apple emojis were shared on World Emoji Day. Not every new emoji is shown, but quite a wide selection have been shared.
🖥 Windows 10 Previews Emoji 11.0 Support
Coming soon to a Windows Update near you: support for Emoji 11.0 additions like mango, skateboard, llama, and peacock. Scroll down for more from the Windows emoji team.
💭 Interesting
😬 Emojiology: Grimacing Face
This one emoji seems to carry a pretty broad variety of uses. John Kelly looks at what 😬 means for different people.
🚀 Now there's an Astro Cat emoji, but it's only available on Windows 10
The Ninja Cat emoji has been around on Windows since 2016, but as some people might not have seen it, here's a bump. These are ZWJ sequences that show the Ninja Cat (or Astro Cat, or Hacker Cat) on Windows, but on other platforms show the individual code points separately: a fairly graceful fallback.
😘 Blowing Kiss Beats Heart-Eyes in New Google Stats
More Gboard users are sending 😘 than 😍 according to new stats from Google. More linked in the article.
🎭 'Emojiland' review
I was at the New York premiere of Emojiland on World Emoji Day (sitting next to the author of this article, incidentally) and really enjoyed it. Great music, superb casting, and it was funny too. I talk to Quinn Rose about Emojiland on the latest Corner of the Sky episode which comes out this weekend.
:) Important correction from Vanity Fair
There is a difference between a smiling emoticon and smiling emoji so I appreciate this correction :)
🐜 Apple’s black ant emoji is all wrong, according to entomologists
This tumblr post did the rounds a while back, and keeps getting picked up. The whole tumblr-emoji-review is a format that continues to work well. Mostly due to the wide variety of designs to comment on.
🦞 Why trans activists are hijacking the lobster emoji
One challenge with flags (not specifically referencing the trans flag here) is that there are so many. Flags for people of Kurdistan, Native American tribes, Indigenous Australians, and a whole host of other LGBT flags. This shouldn't be a case against a trans flag, but it certainly gets trickier when venturing further than ISO codes which are used for the majority of current flags.
💩 Listening to Poo, Your Emoji and You
Screenreaders have no trouble reading the names of an emoji, but this can be disruptive when used in a decorative sense. Good to see sensible options like this from the Icon Factory.
👀 Samsung’s AR Emoji are now more customizable but just as creepy
My feeling with any avatar is it has to be cute, embellished, or a perfect representation. The uncanny valley in the Samsung approach to Bitmoji / Memoji/ AR Emoji just sits in the wrong place for me.
🍷 A white wine emoji could be heading to your keyboards
"Could" is doing a lot of the work here. It's a popular request, but as best as I can tell, there aren't current plans to add this variation.
🤔 Here’s why the U.S. military’s tweets are so bad
I have to admit I didn't see the US military social media posts on World Emoji Day, but when I came across some of them afterward they did take me by, uh, surprise(?). Especially this Animoji post from the Department of Defense.
🎙 Podcasts
🎙 Emoji Wrap with Microsoft Emoji Team
A fresh Emoji Wrap podcast with Judy Safran-Aasen and Mike LaJoie from Microsoft Fluent Design team, responsible for the Windows emoji designs.
🌎 World Emoji Day on MashTalk
If you're not sick of hearing from me this month (I've been taking some time off, believe it or not), Pete Pachal and I recap what's been going on in the emoji world in the past 12 months on the latest episode of MashTalk.