New Emoji and Paul Kafasis’ Favourite Radar ⇥ onefoottsunami.com

Paul Kafasis reacts to the new emoji in iOS 8.3 and OS X 10.10.3:

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?

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.

On a less challenging note, you might be interested to know the new multiracial emoji appear to be ligatures. If you send one of them to a device that doesn’t support the new character set, that device will display the old-style “white” version plus the fallback “not found” character. Conversely, sending an old-style emoji from a device that doesn’t support multiracial emoji to a device that does will display the cartoonish yellow character on the updated device.