July 17th is World Emoji Day every year, and this week Apple took the opportunity to give a public preview of some of the new emoji that will be available on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch this coming fall.
The new emoji are based on the approved character set in Unicode 12.0, which was officially adopted this past March and includes 59 new characters. Apple is also adding the ability to select numerous skin tone variations of the different holding hands emoji, giving a total of 75 possible combinations.
A Sample of Apple’s New Emoji
Animals
Six new animals are being added to the collection including flamingo, guide dog, skunk, orangutan, sloth
Food and Drink
Among the food and drink items are garlic, butter, ice cube, felafel, waffle, oyster (or will that categorized as an animal?), a juice box, and the popular South American drink, maté.
Accessibility
Last year Apple proposed to the Unicode Consortium more disability-themed emoji, and several will be added. Wheelchairs, a new guide dog, a prosthetic arm and a prosthetic leg, and an ear with a hearing aid to name a few.
Activities
A few additions to the activities category will be skydiving, kiting, yo-yo-ing, and banjo-ing.
Miscellaneous
Other miscellaneous items will include safety vest, ballet shoes, sari, one-piece swimsuit, shorts,
What’s next?
If you can’t get enough emoji excitement in your life and are dying to know what may be on the horizon for 2020, you can see the draft candidates of Emoji 13.0 at emojipedia.org and begin planning your party now! 🥳
No one needs anything more then :-( and ;-)
Couldn’t agree more
I always enjoy the misplaced emoji I would get from my 78 yr-old mother.
“I hope you have a great day, son.” (sheep) (swedish flag) (mango)
I did not use emojis. I typed colon hyphen right-parenthesis and semicolon hyphen left-parenthesis. That is what I meant is all that is needed.
I hate emojis. I don’t know what anyone means when they send me one, so I reply telling them not to send emojis to me because I don’t know what they mean. I doubt many others know what most of them are supposed to mean.
The emoji key takes up needed space on the keyboard, so I would accidentally hit the emoji key on my iPhone and then waste time figuring out how to get back to the letter keyboard until I figured out how to delete the keyboard that has the emoji key. Glad it is gone.
No one needs anything more then :-( and ;-)
Emoji’s are a simple way to convey feelings, situations, and put a smile on it
To repeat my objection: I don’t know what most of them are supposed to mean, and I doubt many others do either. There are now 2,823 emojis in the Unicode standard. That is not a “simple way to convey feelings–it is a foreign language.
I see a need for nothing beyond semicolon hyphen close-parenthesis and colon hyphen open-parenthesis. I wrote out the names because the last time I used the characters, this blog converted them to emojis.