Apple Fixes Bagel Emoji (2019)
blog.emojipedia.org
blog.emojipedia.org
There are probably a dozen, at least. Here are a couple of examples off the top of my head:
For a very long time, when you asked Siri the temperature, if it was above 80°, she would add the word "hot" to the end of it. "It's 81 degrees. Hot." Where I was living at the time, 81 degrees meant a light sweater was in order.
When I lived in Chicago, Apple's headphones were worthless in the winter because they were made of plastic that was perfectly bendy in Silicon Valley's climate, but would turn into the equivalent of unweildly coathangars attached to your ears in actual winter conditions. I don't know if that's still the case, as it's what made me switch to wireless headphones years ago.
Even today, where I live in the desert, it's not unusual for a current model iPhone to go into thermal shutdown (with the appropriate warning on the screen) on a perfectly normal spring or summer day, even though I don't use a case. But I expect (hope) that's about something involving electronics that I don't understand.
A) has mind-boggling amount of compute available wherever you go in an insanely small form factor
B) no active cooling meaning you need to be able to vent the heat out of the CPU/RAM/GPU into the ambient environment
C) battery thermals are impacted by temperature
D) hit a price point that balances what people with pay vs margins and how much value you’re willing to invest in any given feature of the device.
It’s more useful to view this as engineering trade offs that would be made regardless of where the engineers are located physically. The engineers that need it are supplied with ovens and freezers to test out different physical environments. These are trillion dollar companies. The equipment or having staff experience and access the right environment isn’t a challenge nor a blind spot.
Designing a phone is a million tradeoffs that boggles the best of the minds. It's an insanely difficult problem.
And this is coming from someone who normally lives in California. I guess the body adjusts to the climate of the region after a couple days.
I'd eat popsicles in Hong Kong falls and winters because I've long since adjusted to the cold.
It's silly that the symbols we use in our language are fixed and determined by a big company (or by a standardization committee for that matter).
Language should be free, and this includes its symbols.
BUT! I haven't seen a mention of which languages the submissions have to use. In fact, the process seems to be only described in English. That puts any culture where English knowledge is limited at a disadvantage. How is that even acceptable in an internationalization organization that influences worldwide standards?
Assuming you know English and want to be a member. To give voice to your culture when it comes to accepting emojis. You need to pay them 75 USD. Okay, that might be hard, but let's assume you managed. You click "join", and... It turns out you need a credit card. Not a local bank account, not even an IBAN account, not an e-peso, not anything that covers the methods of payments the little people use in half the world (there are even places in Europe where credit cards are somewhat expensive for people to have).
This obviously favors cultures where people are:
- rich
- English-speaking
- have easy access to credit cards
My pet theory says that Western sensibilities have led to a persistent lack of an emoji for 𓂸.
So yeah, please let's abandon Unicode emoji and let people decide from the bottom up.
In practice the big companies are more in charge. Apple changed the pistol to a water gun (mentioned in the article and at [0]), and now all the big emoji sets from Google/MS/FB/Twtr/etc. also have a water gun instead of a pistol.
Apple also succeeded at preventing the rifle emoji and the Modern Pentathlon emoji (which contained a rifle) from being included, apparently with support from MS.
[0]: https://blog.emojipedia.org/apple-and-the-gun-emoji/ [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/20/apple-rif...
It's pretty stupid how every other big tech company follows every single bad decision that Apple makes. Removing 3.5mm jack, removing pistol emoji, notches in screens, and now getting rid of chargers.
I personally do everything I can to boycott Unicode emoji. Some platforms like Slack/Discord allow for adding your own emoji which is nice. Language should not be controlled by a single entity.
Apple deliberately and unilaterally made the decision to represent this as a water pistol, despite this being clearly not representative of a typical pistol.
It's expected for individual entities implementing the Unicode emoji specification to exercise some amount of artistic merit, but if they're not at least in good faith attempting to represent the same type of object that the specification calls for, they are saying that they do not care about the decision that the Unicode Consortium made to allow emoji to be used to represent objects of that type, and that they should be the ones with the power to choose what can and cannot be said with emoji.
Twitter’s emoji is also open source: https://twemoji.twitter.com/
There's one more standard, but you could say that about any standardisation effort. These things take a really long time, trying again isn't a bad thing.
Most software standards (and even hardware to some extent) aren't that complicated, if you absolutely nail your design people will switch and yours may dominate. If it doesn't then there's no real harm done because no one's going to use it.
The xkcd works because unless everyone is willing to adopt the new standard, then you further fragment the market. There is zero evidence that the dominant players want to converge here (except maybe if everyone adopts their design!).
What we currently have is centralized in the silo-sense.
Emojis are part of font packs which are pretty standard and open via Open TrueType, no? Apple isn’t quite as simple to do that with (albeit possible via 3p keyboards, custom per-app fonts, or custom device profiles), but it still feels like I’m not understanding your complaint.
This is an interesting claim. I assume they mean that WhatsApp shows the doughnut with pink frosting. But pink frosting is common on actual doughnuts, and it is almost always unflavored, not strawberry flavored.
The 'watering' down of the pistol was more annoying - if only because it ruined one of my favorite emoji combos: neutral face with pistol pointed at itself. Water pistol doesn't have the same effect.
A bagel is not necessarily sliced, and a good fresh bagel can be beneficially eaten like a pretzel without slicing it at all.
If I were the designer given the brief "generic iconic bagel", I would not have it sliced at all, thus avoiding the question of whether or what filling. I would put some seeds (sesame or poppy, either way) on it, to help distinguish from a doughnut.
And yet, all actual variants are sliced. Odd. Does unicode provide a suggested schematic for these, that perhaps suggests sliced?
> Provided each vendor design conveys the concept of a bagel in a sufficiently clear way, the job of the emoji is done.
Microsoft and Samsung's just look like donuts cut in half. Twitter, no clue what that is.
> Our bagel was drawn by someone who has eaten a bodega bagel before.
Google's stylized version is certainly recognizable. As far as eating a bagel from a bodega (which most of the time are plain with no seeds), if you want the good stuff you're going to a bagel shop in Brooklyn.
As a New Yorker I may have put too much thought into this. ;)
As a native New Yorker (Brooklyn born, back when it was still a shithole, and not infested with people from the I-states), I always got the salt bagels.
[0] https://blog.emojipedia.org/google-fixes-burger-emoji/
[1] https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2019/9/24/20882195/ios-13-1-em...
Next they'll be making pop music without guitars in!
Not in npm package manager and source code.
If you need to use emojis in code reviews, you have distrust, or perhaps other bigger problems in your team.
Ask yourself this question "Why do I need to add an emoji?" and introspect the reasons. Usually those reasons are "Well, what if other person is offended by this? What if my statement is too strong?".
“Had no idea you could use x library like this, awesome! :fire: :party: just make sure you’ve also considered y!”
Or if somebody made a simple typo that they’ll easily recognize, they get some kind of silly emoji.
Of course it’s different for comments like “This function seems to be doing too much, making it hard to read, I think it should be refactored to work like ...”. Those ones aren’t like the lighthearted ones, so it would be inappropriate to use emojis there.