Earlier this year Snapchat spent around $100 million to acquire Bitstrips, and today the social network announced its app will now integrate with Bitmoji. Bitmoji is Bitstrips’ iOS app for creating personalized emoji characters. The newly introduced integration between Snapchat and Bitmoji means users can now use Bitmoji emoji characters directly in chats within Snapchat.
One of iOS 10’s cool new features is the ability for developers to create sticker pack animated emojis for iMessage using the Messages API. Apple is showing how it is done, so to speak…
Messaging apps like WeChat, Line, and Path have made stickers as popular as emoji, and now Twitter is joining in on the fun with searchable ‘#Stickers’ that you can add to your tweet pics.
German site Macerkopf has been playing with the latest WhatsApp beta, and notes that it includes a new feature to share music with your contacts. You can share music stored locally on your device, as well as tracks from Apple Music.
72 new emoji will be making their way to iPhone and iPad soon, likely with iOS 10. The Unicode standards body this week ‘released’ the latest round of new emoji characters, including sneezing face, drooling face, ‘selfie’, boxing glove and ‘face palm’. You can see what these will look like in the image above, which is a mockup by Emojipedia of the new emojis in Apple’s graphic style.
Apple has apparently hit the delete button on a proposed rifle emoji that was previously accepted. Unicode, the group behind the character standard, ultimately decided to pull the rifle character from the next emoji set in Unicode 9. Buzzfeed reports, however, that Apple (which has voting rights within the group) largely led the opposition to the rifle emoji:
It’s been essentially confirmed in the past, but today the Unicode Consortium officially unveiled the 72 new emoji that will be made available in Unicode 9. The latest batch of emoji include a variety of new foods, faces, objects, and sports. Unicode 9 is set to be released on June 21st, which means we may see these new emoji in iOS 10 when it ships to the public this fall.
Snapchat is changing how you communicate with friends in a major way through what it’s calling Chat 2.0. The social network says it focused two years ago on making chatting more like face-to-face conversation with features like letting you know when your friends were present and “listening” to what you were typing, and the latest Snapchat update refocuses on the 1-to-1 chat aspect of the app with new features around voice and video calling plus stickers and more. How you watch Stories is also getting a change in the new update.
Welcome to the latest edition of Jeremy’s 5, my latest quick roundup of 5 interesting little things that aren’t big enough for full articles, but are still worth sharing with you.
This week, I’m looking at the next wave of emoji, T-Mobile’s 4G LTE CellSpot, Google Photos, iCloud/iTunes Account Merging, and battery drain from the latest iOS beta…
Welcome to the latest edition of Jeremy’s 5, my latest quick roundup of 5 interesting little things I’ve been testing over the past week. These are all items that aren’t big enough for full articles, but are worth sharing with you anyway.
This week’s edition discusses the state of Apple TV apps/games as we close out 2015, a tip on how to deal with a broken Touch ID sensor, and three apps: Kimoji, Badland 2, and Real Boxing 2 CREED…
Apple yesterday released iOS 9.1 to the public with a handful of improvements, but the one that the general public was most excited about was new emoji. While most of the emoji additions were self-explantory, one piqued the interest of many users: an eye inside of a speech bubble. Wired and Jeremy Burge both now note, however, that this emoji is Apple’s way to show its support for a new anti-bullying campaign launched today by the Ad Council.
Called the “I Am A Witness” campaign, the movement hopes to give teenagers the courage they need to speak up whenever they see or experience bullying. The Ad Council hopes that Apple adding the emoji to iOS 9.1 will help raise awareness for its campaign and bullying in general.
The design of the emoji is actually the combination of two already existing emojis, the eye emoji and the left speech bubble. By creating the emoji from preexisting images, Apple was able to fast track the emoji’s addition to its keyboard.
“When we first asked about bringing this emoji to the official Apple keyboard, they told us it would take at least a year or two to get it through and approved under Unicode,” says Wittmark. The company found a way to fast-track it, she says, by combining two existing emoji.
In addition to Apple, companies including Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Tumblr, and Google have expressed their support for the I Am A Witness anti-bullying campaign.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V32xhSMhCXE
Apple is out with a new update for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch today, the official iOS 9.1 release. For most users, a collection of new emoji characters including a taco, unicorn, and yes, a middle finger is the most notable new feature within the update. Apple has also tweaked its three planetary wallpapers and developer support for Live Photos as well as improvements to the capture experience.
Expand
Expanding
Close
Apple could potentially be facing a fine upwards of one million rubles in Russia (which is only about $15,000 USD) over its inclusion of same-sex couple emoji characters on the built-in iOS keyboard. The Independent reports that police in Russia have began an investigation into Apple to determine whether the company has violated a highly controversial national ban on activity its government considers homosexual propaganda.
Local police in Russia’s Kirov region began their enquiries after Orthodox activist and lawyer Yaroslav Mikhailov complained that the images violated a controversial 2013 law banning the promotion of homosexuality to minors.
Apple today released the second beta version of the upcoming iOS 9.1 software update to developers. The update includes stability fixes and performance enhancements for the recent iOS 9 release, which left many users stuck with problems using their phones.
The update also includes a variety of brand-new emoji characters.
Not to be outdone by iOS 9.1’s set of new emoji, watchOS 2 GM, released this past Wednesday following Apple’s press event, includes a little surprise of it’s own. Alongside a bunch of new watch face colors, dig into the animated emoji offered on the Apple Watch, and you’ll find 26 new options, ranging from faces sporting sunglasses, to sick faces, and even a few sets of clapping and fist bumping hands. Check out the gallery below to see them all in action:
Expand
Expanding
Close
In addition to announcing the new iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, Apple TV 4, and iPad Pro at its Hey Siri event today, Apple has shipped something perhaps even bigger in the first beta versions of the upcoming iOS 9.1 software update: new emojis! The latest character editions to the special keyboard include options for tacos, unicorns, squirrels, crabs, and a lot more. The glyphs for each section like Animals & Nature and Objects have also been updated. The new keyboard will ship with iOS 9.1 which is expected to debut later in November. More examples below:
Expand
Expanding
Close
After mostly letting it sit stagnant for nearly two years, Instagram is ready to show its Direct messaging feature some love. Instagram Direct, which lets you share photos, videos, and messages privately with other Instagram users, was seen as a play at Snapchat and similar apps when it launched in 2013, but it’s so far experienced limited appeal within the photo sharing app. Now Instagram hopes to change that with new features including message threads, giant emoji, sharing from your timeline, and more.
Expand
Expanding
Close
SwiftKey today has revealed a new feature coming to its iOS app. For those unfamiliar, SwiftKey is one of the most popular third-party keyboard solutions for iOS, offering up a plethora of capabilities and features not found with Apple’s stock offering. Today, SwiftKey announced that it is rolling out a new feature called “Your Signature Emoji” to users of its beta app.
After around seven million downloads of its popular third-party keyboard app, Fleksy is today announcing that its mobile apps will be completely free for all going forward.
The company was originally charging $4 for the app but had dropped the price to $1 and even made the app free temporarily a couple times in the past. Starting today, however, Fleksy says its apps for both iOS and Android will be free forever.
For everyone that has paid for the app and feels left out, Fleksy is offering a free gift that it says is worth $8 to make up for it. The in-app download includes a selection of new themes and extensions, which also arrive with today’s update. While the app is going free for all to download and use, the company will continue offering premium themes and extensions as paid in-app purchases.
In addition to going free, the company highlighted some other new features and improvements arriving today:
Going free is not the only big update today. We also launched an improved rich content view called Highlights. Meaning, Fleksy will better assist with GIF, sticker and other content discovery based on what you type. Instead of manually searching for stickers and GIFs on separate pages, now you’ll only need to tap on the auto-recommended hashtag (Highlight) and Fleksy will take you to an integrated page of relevant content all in one convenient place.
The Fleksy Keyboard app for iPhone and iPad is available on the App Store now. A full list of what’s included in the update below:
*Note: Please update to the latest version of iOS 8 to fix key known issues with custom keyboards and improve your Fleksy experience.
Featuring:
• 5 new themes for summertime!
• Consolidated GIF and Imoji extensions to a single bar. Smarter search, more results, all in one view. And just pull down to bring back the keypad!
• Fleksy will now highlight 3 keywords at a time. Easier to get to that perfect GIF or sticker.
• Ever want more Hotkeys? You can now add multiple Hotkey extensions!
• Major language improvements
• Updated Extension tab UI in the container app for easier browsing
• Optimizations for GIF and Imoji Sticker quality
Fixed:
• Fixes for autocorrect capitalizing letters incorrectly for some languages
• Autocorrect on/off Button not showing on spacebar sometimes
• Various other bug fixes and performance improvements
VoiceOver Updates:
• Gesture: swipe down with two fingers to Return (while in Minimal mode)
• “New Line” announced on Return
• Feedback on Shift and Delete buttons
• “No more text to delete” announced when there’s nothing left to delete
• Improved accuracy
Before the launch of Apple Watch, Twitterrific for iPhone gained support for a Watch app that featured a variety of capabilities. Now, the company has updated its iPhone app and with it come new features for both the Watch and phone. Version 5.12 of Twitterrific adds support for Twitter’s new quoted tweets feature, which embeds the actual tweet instead of simply quoting it as text. To do a quote retweet with Twitterrific, simply tap and hold on the RT button.
Apple has released the first software update for Apple Watch today with the release of Watch OS 1.0.1. The update is available through the Apple Watch app on iPhone.
Expand
Expanding
Close
Instagram announced today that three new photo filters will be making their way to the photo sharing app later today through an update on the iOS App Store. The new filters are called Lark, Reyes, and Juno, and are focused on enhancing outdoor photography.
These new filters are just the first of many, as the app’s development team has promised to add new filters more regularly in future updates.
A couple of weeks following the first beta, Apple today released iOS 8.4 beta 2 to developers for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. iOS 8.4 beta 2 is available via Software Update for those running the first beta, and it should be available for download soon via the Apple Developer Website. Apple has also released the iOS 8.4 Public Beta 1, which corresponds to this second developer seed, and Xcode 6.4 beta 2.
As we first reported, iOS 8.4 brings a revamped Music app to iOS with a new design, a Mini-Player feature, improved search, and a larger focus on album artwork. At WWDC, Apple will announce the new Music app and its integration with a new Beats-based streaming music service. We’ll update this post live as new features in the second beta are discovered.
With Apple’s release of iOS 8.3 and OS X 10.10.3, there are now over 300 new emojis including diversity options. Apple uses the unicode emoji set, which includes Spock’s Vulcan salute. However, Apple hasn’t added the Vulcan salute — or “raised hand with fingers separated between the ring and the middle finger” symbol as it’s officially named — to the emoji keyboard, so you cannot type it without creating a workaround. There is a trick, however, that can be done by creating a keyboard shortcut.
Live Long And Prosper
🖖
— Sarah Guarino (@sarahg1113) April 10, 2015
Open up this tweet on your iOS device. Then you are going to copy the emoticon by tapping and holding on it. Then press Copy.
Since we copied Vulcan salute emoji, we can now create the text shortcut. Open up Settings, and then select General.
Scroll down and select Keyboard.
Then select Shortcuts.
