Unicode 15
The latest emoji list drafted by the Unicode Consortium is due for formal approval today, with new emojis including a Goose, a Hyacinth, a Shaking Face, and a plain Pink Heart.
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These 11 sequences are ten new skin tone modifier sequences - five each for the new Rightwards Pushing Hand and Leftwards Pushing Hand emojis - and one new zero width joiner (ZWJ) sequence, namely, the new 🐦⬛ Black Bird.
As it turns out, 73% of those polled thought people who used emojis are friendlier, funnier, and cooler than those who don’t. And 91% of respondents felt that emoji make it easier to express themselves — with 60% reporting that emojis have the ability to boost overall mental health.
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Perhaps least surprising of all, the tears of joy emoji continues to be the favorite emoji of those in the U.S.
Update (2022-09-26): Jonty Wareing (via Hacker News):
The character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated in version 15.0.0.
Because it doesn’t have enough eyes. It needs to have three more eyes.
I absolutely love that there’s a unicode character with a single documented use, and it wasn’t even correct.
They need to stop wasting time with this emoji crap. If you want to send an arbitrary smiley face in literally any shade or arrangement you could possibly ever imagine, we already have a technology to do that. It is called Portable Network Graphics (PNG) and it has been around since 1996.
A 32x32 pixel, RGB PNG file with 8 bits per channel can encode over 17 billion unique combinations! Wow! Amazing!
A PNG file I just now compressed is only 247 bytes! Unbelievable!
Instead of waiting for Unicode Consortium to decide to support some new shade, or slightly different arrangement of a face, or some new symbol, you can just invent your own and use it immediately! Holy crap!