Emoji News for April 9th, 2015

Readers are likely aware of this blog’s love of the wonderful world of emoji. Today, we bring you important emoji news updates.

Apple officially released iOS 8.3 and Mac OS X 10.10.3 on Wednesday, and these updates brought some emoji changes. As previously discussed, the new operating systems offer multiple pigments for many of the people emoji. In fact, iOS will even teach you how to use this functionality:

Select Skin Tone

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!

There are no plans to address this. We are now closing this report.
Not a good sign

One can only hope that “There are no plans to address this” is not an actual statement of policy from Apple.

There is one small bit of positive movement on the emoji front. As first reported over on Six Colors, Apple has tweaked things for one solitary new emoji. Likely as a tribute to the late Leonard Nimoy, “Raised Hand With Part Between Middle And Ring Fingers” is now semi-supported. While it doesn’t appear in the emoji keyboard itself, the symbol will be shown properly when a page refers to it. Scrolling Emojipedia’s new emoji page shows the lone newcomer:

One visible emoji
A whole lotta unsupportedness

The rest of the new emoji remain entirely unsupported, and don’t appear at all at this time. We’ll keep you apprised, as more develops.