KUALA LUMPUR: People love emojis and they use them all the time. These small digital images or icon are used to give a sense of expression or emotion to the things we write on the wall of our social media accounts.
And from simple smiley and people, these emojis have evolved creatively over the years to become more all sort of things and expressions. So popular, they were even turned into a movie, The Emoji Movie, in 2017.
To celebrate World Emoji Day, July 17, Apple previewed some of the new emojis coming to its platform soon.
The Cupertino-based company, for instance, revealed the newest designs that bring even more diversity to the keyboard, alongside fun and exciting additions to popular categories of food, animals, activities and smiley faces.
In a major update to the Holding Hands emoji typically used to represent couples and relationships, users will now be able to select any combination of skin tone, in addition to gender, to personalise the people holding hands, opening up more than 75 possible combinations.
Following Apple’s proposal to the Unicode Consortium last year to introduce more disability-themed emoji, a new guide dog, an ear with a hearing aid, wheelchairs, a prosthetic arm and a prosthetic leg will be available in the emoji keyboard.
The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organisation based in California, with primary purpose to maintain and publish the Unicode Standard, which was developed with the intention of replacing existing character encoding schemes which are limited in size and scope, and are incompatible with multilingual environments.
Fifty-nine new emoji designs will be available this fall with a free software update for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch. Thousands of emoji are currently available, including emotive smiley faces, gender-neutral characters, more professions, various clothing options, food types, animals, mythical creatures and more. New emoji are created based on the approved characters in Unicode 12.0.
Many additional emoji categories are getting exciting updates with a new smiley face for yawning, a one-piece swimsuit, new food items including a waffle, falafel, butter and garlic, and new animals like the sloth, flamingo, orangutan and skunk.
According to Apple, these new options help fill a significant gap in the emoji keyboard.
As for Google, its new emojis are expected to arrive with the release of Android Q later this year.