Michal Ždanský The Unicode Consortium, the association that takes care of the Unicode encoding, has released a new version 7.0, which will soon become the standard in most operating systems. Unicode regulates the encoding and display of characters across devices regardless of language. The latest version will bring a total of 2 new characters, including characters for some currencies, new symbols and special characters for some languages.
In addition, 250 Emoji will also be added. Originally from Japan, this set of symbols has more or less replaced the classic character emoticons in modern instant messaging and is supported across operating systems and web services. In the previous version 6.0 there were 722 different emoticons, so version 7.0 will count almost a thousand.
Among the new characters we can find, for example, a chili pepper, system controls, the Vulcan salute known to Star Trek fans, or the long-requested hand with a raised middle finger. You can find a list of all new emoticons at this page, but their visual form is still missing. Apple is likely to include the new version of Unicode in updates to the iOS and OS X operating systems that will be released this fall.
Apple also previously promised to work with the Unicode Consortium to bring racially diverse emoticons, as the current Unicode includes mostly Caucasian characters, but according to the list of new emoticons, it does not contain any Emoji falling into faces. We will probably have to wait for them until version 8.0.
Racially different emoticons? The world is really screwed.
To say that it will soon become a standard in most operating systems is also a joke. Hell would have to freeze over for Microsoft to rewrite Windows to UTF-8
Yay, that's what I've been wanting, another 250 characters that I can use as
variable names to make my source files of my programs become graphical hell :D