Better Emoji in Mac OS X 10.10.3
One immediately evident change is the menu option used to bring up the character palette where emoji and other symbols can be browsed and selected. The Character palette a is systemwide option generally accessed through the “Edit” menu in most Mac apps. On OS X 10.10.2 and earlier, the menu item is called “Special Characters,” while on OS X 10.10.3, it is labeled “Emoji & Symbols”. The change offers a clearer description of what can be accessed through the menu item while specifically giving a strong visibility boost to emoji.
Another significant change for emoji in OS X 10.10.3 is the apparent laying of groundwork to support skin tone modifiers proposed for the Unicode 8.0 standard.
See also: Wink in All Colors.
Update (2015-04-03): Paul Kafasis:
However, after much searching I realized I was to be let down once again. None of the emoji from the updated Unicode 7 spec are included. Apple continues to flip us the figurative bird by refusing to provide us with a literal middle finger. Diversity of races is surely a good thing, but where is the diversity for people who wish to communicate with widely recognized hand gestures? Surely we deserve satisfaction!
This is actually — no bullshit — a very good question. Apple tends to be super cautious about being family friendly, to a sometimes ridiculous degree, but the “Reversed Hand With Middle Finger Extended” emoji is a totally valid Unicode character, as much as the letter ‘p’ is. Does Apple’s avoidance of anything even slightly profane trump their full support of the Unicode character set? I don’t think it should. It’s a character, like anything else, and Apple should support it.
Update (2015-04-08): Jason Snell:
The latest betas of OS X and iOS add support for a single new emoji symbol: Raised Hand with Part Between Middle and Ring Finger. […] I assume this is a tribute to Leonard Nimoy, and it’s wonderful. No doubt someone at Apple is dutifully working on all these new emoji symbols, and they’ll eventually debut in a future OS update, but in the meantime, Spock’s salute has gone to a strange, new world: emoji.
Update (2015-04-09): Paul Kafasis:
Unfortunately, however, the much-sought-after “Reversed Hand With Middle Finger Extended” is still unavailable in either of Apple’s OSes. Worse, Apple recently closed the bug report your humble author filed in hopes of making this available to the eager masses!
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Nice to see people still assume that the programmers working on font and text rendering would otherwise be, say, plugging holes in Core Data syncing resolution. (Now, is this the most important thing they could be spending their time on in all of text rendering? No, probably not compared to e.g. adding a new script, but supporting newer forms of Emoji as they evolve and implementing new Unicode standards are surely part of their job description.)
Nice to see Apple’s focusing on what really matters.