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New Emoji Are Being Delayed Because of the Coronavirus Pandemic (mashable.com) 61

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
One unexpected effect of the coronavirus pandemic has to do with the colorful little pictograms we use on our phones and computers to express, well, pretty much everything: emoji. From a report: According to the Unicode Consortium, a non-profit which takes care of the Unicode Standard -- a widely-used standard for character encoding on computers and phones -- the release of Unicode 14.0 has been postponed by six months. "Under the current circumstances we've heard that our contributors have a lot on their plates at the moment and decided it was in the best interests of our volunteers and the organizations that depend on the standard to push out our release date," Mark Davis, President of the Unicode Consortium, said in a statement. Unicode 14.0 was supposed to be released in March 2021, but that has been moved six months into the future, to September 2021. Since it takes a while for developers to incorporate new emoji into phones -- typically eight months or so, according to the Consortium -- this means we won't get any new emoji until well into 2022.
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New Emoji Are Being Delayed Because of the Coronavirus Pandemic More

New Emoji Are Being Delayed Because of the Coronavirus Pandemic

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  • Oh noez! Not our emojis! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Chas ( 5144 ) on Thursday April 09, 2020 @01:09PM (#59925714) Homepage Journal

    How ever shall we cope?

    Light news day today?

    • I'm thankful that my iphone has had a virus emoji for some time, it even looks like a coronavirus. Maybe it's not standardized though, but the standards police are not considered essential so they have to stay in their homes.

    • Light news day today?

      'Light intellects' at the controls.

    • I feel there should be an emoji to express by dismay, but there isn't one and unfortunately it appears there won't be one for at least 6 months. I am grief stricken to the point of losing all feelings and emotion due to lack of a unicode supported method of conveying those feelings and emotions.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by BranMan ( 29917 )

      "At least they didn't say we're out of coffee!"

    • Light news day today?

      It's good to have a story with good news for a change. Would you prefer we threw another Trump story on the front page instead?

    • How ever shall we cope?

      Light news day today?

      ~Chas

      LITERACY
      is a profound activity requiring composition.
      Until one addresses their knowledge and familiarity with a topic to organize and give expression to furthering, iterating, or merely repeating ideas, what does one really know?
      See Bloom's Taxonomy

      Additionally, emoji characters are profound signal to glean an aggregate measure of an app-captive population's "feels" for an evolving catalog of category of trending consumer beliefs that informs a potential to purchase any and every thing.

      How do you thi

  • Blame it on the virus. Blame it on the pandemic. Milk it for a year, or two, maybe even three. Blame it on the virus.

  • Silver lining (Score:5, Funny)

    by Nidi62 ( 1525137 ) on Thursday April 09, 2020 @01:16PM (#59925728)

    See, something good was bound to come out of this pandemic.

    • Wow! I guess I had COVID-19 all wrong!

      • This is in addition to the disappearance of the robocall, no more annoyming spam callers, I guess "rip off centers" are not an essential service.

        • I'm not getting any junk mail in the snail mail anymore. Add in the lack of people driving and flying plus the lack of junk people aren't buying (even if they have money) the Coronavirus is doing wonders for the environmental movement. Too bad it's at such a high cost.

          Maybe some of these behaviours will stick with some people when things start to go back to the way things were before. There was always a hesitancy about moving people to work from home, mostly from managers that wanted to keep a close eye on

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by mark-t ( 151149 )
      Last week, it was noticed that because of how much quieter cities have become earthquakes as low as magnitude -2 have been detected that would have otherwise been lost to the seismic noise produced by typical levels of human activity.

  • OH NOES (Score:5, Funny)

    by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Thursday April 09, 2020 @01:16PM (#59925730) Journal

    "...this means we won't get any new emoji until well into 2022."

    OH MY GOD, this is tragic news indeed. It makes this whole pandemic thing look like a minor boo-boo.

    When historians look back at the devastation caused by COVID-19, one of the key things they will undoubtedly highlight will be the delay in getting new emojis.

    • Archaeologists will notice a gap in the emoji strata and deduce that there was a great catastrophe.

      (Do not ask us where we were when the Dragon Broke, for, of all the world, only we truly know, and we might just show you how to break it again.)

      • I think they already got that, from there being emoji strata. :)

      • Archaeologists will notice a gap in the emoji strata and deduce that there was a great catastrophe.

        I'm not sure when and I'm not sure how, but I swear by all that's holy that I will use the term "emoji strata" at some point in the near future.

        Maybe I'll work it into my usual bullshit or word-salad at the next staff meeting I'm forced to go to, but one way or another I'm going to use this phrase!

  • I miss the days... (Score:3)

    by DigitAl56K ( 805623 ) on Thursday April 09, 2020 @01:18PM (#59925734)

    ... when people would actually be creative with ASCII-style emojis.

    I'd like an option not only to not display graphic emoji's, but to inform the person at the other end that I won't receive them as they pull up the damn things on their picker.

  • Tell me again how this is a bad thing?

  • Where's the FLAMINGO? (Score:3)

    by AndyKron ( 937105 ) on Thursday April 09, 2020 @01:34PM (#59925798)
    I've been waiting for over a year for the goddamn FLAMINGO!
  • And nothing of value was lost^H^H^H^H delayed.

  • Good (Score:2)

    by ebcdic ( 39948 )
    Using characters for this is a stupid idea.

    • Why not just have a unique sticker URI registry, and send URIs?
      That would functionally be completely equivalent.

      And only so the picures aren't constantly re-transferred and even re-compressed through the Internet.

      Signal and Telegram have something like that, but don't offer interspersing them with text. (Because we'd go down the route to HTML with that.)

  • Go all the way, and turn Unicode into a complete language of visual primitives, like Chinese writing... with all the image editing primitives aswell.

    I mean once you're past the smiling turd emoji, noting matters anymore anyway.

    • ... to communicate emotions. For Japanese people.

      So the sane path would have been, to come up with a way to write emotions that accompany the alphabetic words written with alphabetic emotion-words too. Sort of like a second track on a theme park attraction cinema projector, for controlling special effects.
      "Hahaha" could be an example of such an emotion word.

      • We already have a way to communicate emotions. They're called "words".
        • Words actually do a pretty bad job expressing emotions. Body language and intonation help a lot, but obviously you can't use those on the internet. I think emojis are necessary sometimes. I work in China right now, and I am constantly using them to make sure my coworkers and friends understand my mood when I send a message.

  • "colorful little pictograms we use on our phones and computers"

    Never used one in my life, so I suspect that is the Royal We, or perhaps it is descriptive of the members of a class, such as twitter twats.

  • Inventing emoji? They've lost their purpose (Score:3)

    by blitz487 ( 606553 ) on Thursday April 09, 2020 @02:22PM (#59925922)
    The Unicode people should be standardizing existing alphabets. Not inventing new ones every month.
  • ...think devices have to hold the fonts for these endless inventions?

  • It'd be lovely if there were some apocalypse that would lead us to need to get rid of all emoji.

  • Emoji 14 should mean... (Score:3)

    by PsychoSlashDot ( 207849 ) on Thursday April 09, 2020 @02:45PM (#59926000)
    Emoji 14.0 should mean "there are no more than 14 emoji".

    Seriously, I understand a smiley face, a frowning face, a thumbs-up, a middle-finger-up, a heart shape, and maybe a few more. But with hundreds of emoji, most of which are not iconic, we're back to needing to establish common language to assign to them. Might as well use words.

    This isn't get-off-my-damned-lawn... I accept that there's some use in icons to express emotion. But there's no can-of-soup emotion. Sorry, no.

    • Emojis are the logical step on our transition to the world that Cyberpunk predicted, where most people are eventually illiterate again because any written communication can be done by pictograms.

      It's actually amazing that they managed to predict that in the 80s.

  • Wasn't this the release with the Mario in a wedding dress Emoji?
  • [ ] News for nerds
    [ ] Stuff that matters
    [X] Best of idle.slashdot.org

  • No more new emojis? It's over

  • How will I be able to convey my political woke-ness without the latest 57 gender emojis?
  • A computer and network?
  • ... forced to use last year's emojis.

  • Will there finally be an emoji for a basic tool like a shovel?

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