Apple

[Eleven]

I mentioned Android because that was mentioned in previous posts. What I really want to say is everyone, including windows phone and others like rim or whatever. My bad.

 

I assume you meant can't on your 2nd paragraph. Let's not get into the group message thing, we are talking only about those smileys. See, to answer your question again, it's a trivial thing. I mean people don't write sentences in emoji. And not everyone uses it. As i said, this is just an enhancement for iOS users. So i don't see anything really wrong with it.

 

And again, when i say holding back , it was more of a rhetorical question. Because the way i saw the conversation going is that, ok, this is not a standard thing. We know that. What should w do? Let's just implement it and not care about the competition. Or not implement it at all? That's why i mentioned holding back. It's a feature users want. Apple gave it to them. It's as simple as that. The fact that it's not a standard is not important right now. As you said , there are two other variants. It just so happens that Apple picked this one, and based on fuchi's post, it made sense.

 

The issue i really have about this complaint is Dean making it something like a huge Apple flaw, when it is really not. It's missing smileys that wouldn't even be there if Apple has not added the feature. Now, it looks like the problem is not that Apple is using non-standard smileys. It's that there's no standard emoji to begin with.

 

Which for me is a very trivial thing.

[TheMightyEthan]

Just in principle I think that people/companies should not add non-standard "features" within their implementations of standard protocols/communication methods/etc. If Apple had emoji that worked just on an Apple messenger system that allowed communication specifically between iPhone users then that would be one thing, but allowing its use in non-Apple things like SMS, Twitter, etc, fucks things up for everyone else who may not be on Apple but nonetheless receives the communication. It's no different than MS's jacked-up HTML implementation in older versions of IE.

[Eleven]

It looks like WP7 supports Emoji and is compatible with iOS. Also as FDS said, 4.1 Android does too, and from what I read that's true.

 

So we aren't really arguing about anything as it is supported everywhere. Except twitter. Maybe twitter should go ahead and adopt it, seeing as they are pretty much SMS anyway.

[deanb]

See I'm in the stance of Ethan. Emoticons are old as the earth and are as standard as it comes: raw text. Then it's up to the platform your on, be it phone, desktop client, internet, IM client whatever, to turn it from a

into a . And because underneath it's just raw text it comes out as such, and thus legible, in platforms that don't support that. Compared to emoji which comes out in a variety of errors on a wide range of platforms as previously exampled. Which as best I can tell Emoji is anyway, just it's turning a string of random characters into a instead of the colon n D

 

If it was something Apple implemented that was built purely for use within iOS infrastructure, then sure it's fine. But it's for use within SMS and twitter n such; fairly open multi-platform services. There's a reason why there's organisations like W3C, GSMA etc. They keep things standard for high interoperability on multi-platform services. Apple don't really have the knack of that concept.

 

Also just a heads up but I made like one post and have since been n had a meal out n come back. It's you lot making a big fuss over it without my input.

 

edit: Twitter can use SMS, but it isn't SMS. And SMS doesn't support Emoji either. Twitter does support the sending, the web example shown is that browsers don't support emoji, so doesn't matter if Twitter bothers to add it to their site, it requires the browsers to do so too.

[fuchikoma]

I agree that standardization is a good thing, especially in communication these days. Still, standards should not hobble innovation either. When you only implement things that are universally supported, you build to accommodate the lowest common denominator. Now, when something is first implemented by a consortium formed to ratify the spec, such as USB, DVD or Blu-Ray, you can raise that common denominator to a pretty decent standard, but at the same time, if someone has the need for better, they can't just start making H.264 DVDs, or 1 Gbps USB 2 - they have to wait until a new version or whole new technology rolls around.

 

But in the case of emoji, it's something that didn't have a common standard to begin with, and already existed with or without Apple. Still, holding with common standards as much as possible, when Apple changed, they implemented it in Unicode: According to a developer, troubleshooting issues with it:

With iOS 5, Apple switched to an unified mapping, using Unicode Standard v6.0. The standard contains a shared proposal by Google and Apple to align and use a common character set for the emojis. That’s way, user can send SMS containing emojis, from an Android to an iPhone, without any character losses! That’s why our little alien emoji is coded now using 4 bytes instead of 3 on iOS 4.

 

So there's a twist in the twist - Apple did Emoji SoftBank's way to support the carrier that had their phone, then they took off and did it a new way... to better adhere to standards and allow cross-platform compatibility.

[fuchikoma]

and before someone says "but emoji isn't part of Unicode, so they're breaking the standard!" That's actually supported by Unicode as well.

[Faiblesse Des Sens]

@ 111

 

No, I meant can. Do you think that iOS users can only talk to people on iOS? The whole issue is that emojis and group texts look fucked up when sending them to other people.

 

Anyways, triviality or not, it's still something to talk about and it does represent Apple's stance on a lot of things. Like I keep saying, the issue isn't iOS users using it, it's when they use it on things that aren't iOS as in when they text their friend who isn't on a compatible platform. So this is about making it compatible for everyone rather than just telling iOS they can't have it. They should have it. Everyone should have it. It's motherfuckin' SMS man.

 

Anyways, Dean is getting at my point in much better words:

 

But it's for use within SMS and twitter n such; fairly open multi-platform services. There's a reason why there's organisations like W3C, GSMA etc. They keep things standard for high interoperability on multi-platform services. Apple don't really have the knack of that concept.

 

Couldn't agree more.

 

So there's a twist in the twist - Apple did Emoji SoftBank's way to support the carrier that had their phone, then they took off and did it a new way... to better adhere to standards and allow cross-platform compatibility.

 

Yeah, I brought up ages ago about how the newest standard, whenever it was coming out (apparently it's now) would be usable by everyone.

 

 

I have no idea how we got here at this point other than the general convo we were having about Apple not giving any fucks about universality.

[deanb]

DVD and Blu-Rays aren't/weren't exactly "lowest common denominator". USB 1.0 was kinda shit mind, but it's clearly blown past everything since then and moved at a nippy enough pace. And these technologies are created by a consortium of like minded companies to create a standard so that people don't end up with semi-useless disc drives for their xbox, or songs that don't play on their new music player, or their phone charger doesn't work with their new phone, or their website doesn't work in their web browser and so on. Apple is a big company, it's a fairly old one as far as tech does. The web itself was made on a NextStep. And yet it doesn't seem to be too in the business of getting together a group of buddies and hashing out a standard of sorts. It wants to do everything their own way n screw talking it over with everyone else. It's worse than late 90's Microsoft in some cases. And MS went so far down the rabbit hole of fucking over standards that the internet is still picking up the pieces nearly two decades later.

 

And it's neat they're now bashing out a standard with Google, but was it so hard to sit down n have a chat with them about it years back? It now kinda screws over all the devs that implemented the initial emoji "standard" Apple adopted. Which doesn't realyl make it any better than a consortium agreed standard in that aspect really.

 

p.s from what I'm reading of that wiki, it's basically "we left some spare, do with it as you want but it's not part of unicode so don't expect the same thing for every OS/program/whatever"

[fuchikoma]

I'd already said that when a standard is made with a consortium that it's generally better. I mean as opposed to a company just making something up and going "this is our standard - feel free to use it!" like Atari 2600 games or LS120 disks(?). Though I did sort of confuse that by talking about restraints in them...

 

Sorry, but what I see here is blind Apple hate. I never thought I'd type at such length to defend a company I've gone from detesting to just having some ambivalent distaste for, but they've extremely opened up and standardized from their old days and now they're not much worse than any other proprietary player.

 

It wants to do everything their own way n screw talking it over with everyone else. [...] And it's neat they're now bashing out a standard with Google,

 

but was it so hard to sit down n have a chat with them about it years back?

 

Yes, but I'm at wits' end to make it any clearer: Emoji is a standard for phones. When the iPhone launched, there wasn't even an Android OS yet. Emoji wasn't made up by Apple, it was made by SoftBank. Apple didn't intend anyone off of SoftBank to use emoji. So why would it even occur to them to discuss it with Google, ultimately their competitor, and what say would Apple have had in what emoji was in the first place?

 

And your assessment of the private-use areas is almost spot-on, but it IS Unicode. It's just a reserved area in which there is no guarantee of what will map to any given character on a given system. It's like "here are a bunch of table values. Implement them as you like."

Edited September 27, 2012 by fuchikoma

[deanb]

It's kinda rude to add in bits to quotes of other people btw.

 

Yeah you rather confused the matter with your talk of constraints on standards being "lowest common denominator" n such. Doesn't exactly give the impression you consider them to be better. Being an "open and standardized proprietary player" is a bit of an oxymoron. And back in the old days they didn't develop phones nor web powered devices. Building monitors that only work with your desktops is pretty fine, it's a completely closed ecosystem. But SMS, the web, Twitter, etc isn't.

 

As for Emoji I'm aware Apple didn't build it, their carrier did. But it was Apple that put it in iOS and OSX for iOS n OSX users to use without any constraint or heads up that it wouldn't work for anyone not on an Apple device. And when iPhone launched there was Blackberry, Symbian, Bada, Palm, Windows Mobile and probably a fair few others. So there was plenty of folks to talk to and go "hey wouldn't it be cool if all phone users could use Emoji, don't you think it'd be neat to develop a standard that works across all handsets?"

 

<blink> is HTML, there's also no guarantee it'll work how you want it too, or if it'll work at all. Same with private-use area. Yeah it's there, but it's shaky territory to use. However : and D and P and > and so on are all definitely part of unicode. Which is part of why it's all a bit of a bitch. It's attempting to create a (badly implemented) standard where one exists already. A universal, platform agnostic system that in usability can be implemented pretty much entirely the same.

[fuchikoma]

I didn't add anything to the quotes - I just cut out a small part to juxtapose two very near sentences to highlight the cognitive dissonance it took to keep accusing Apple of making up their own thing as they go along and ignoring standards, despite mounting evidence to the contrary.

 

Opera uses a proprietary engine and is closed-source. It has some of the top levels of compliance for open standards like HTML and CSS. MS Office is totally proprietary, and can use formats like TXT and RTF. Apple may remain closed source, but they've adopted more and more open standards like standard "IBM" PC architecture, USB, FAT32 support, EFI and so on. That's far more open than PowerPC systems using ADB connectors and HFS filesystem. So it's not quite the oxymoron it seems unless you take it to mean open-source instead of adopting open standards like we've been talking about.

 

And again, emoji was never Apple's to define and there was no reason to think it'd be used outside of SoftBank in Japan when they got into it. So there's absolutely no reason they would have discussed it with any other handset maker since they were just implementing something that was there before them. It's absurd to keep holding them to account for it, knowing as much. It turns out that once the standard was made popular accidentally, they did just that - discussed with other vendors how to implement an open standard for emoji. Also, the standard you're saying exists already would lose the majority of symbols in emoji, a few of which being: Alien, sick person with a mask on, a wide range of hearts in different states, sparkle, shining star, vein bulge, fire, smiling poop, thumb up, thumb down, ok sign, fist, hand showing rock, paper, scissors, wave, stop (palm out, fingers up), 10 other hand gestures, a range of ages, genders and ethnicities, bowing construction worker, smiling cop, skull, footprints, kiss-mark, mouth, ear, eyes, nose... and that's just the first page of palettes, skipping over the various weather, animals, plants, electronics, tools, sporting goods, gaming pieces, clothes, accessories, other household objects, foods, buildings, scenes, vehicles, road signs, flags, indicators, and other marks... But like I was saying, they could just cater to the lowest common denominator and replace it with a handful of facial expressions...

Edited September 27, 2012 by fuchikoma

[deanb]

It wants to do everything their own way n screw talking it over with everyone else. [...] And it's neat they're now bashing out a standard with Google,

 

but was it so hard to sit down n have a chat with them about it years back?

 

It wants to do everything their own way n screw talking it over with everyone else. It's worse than late 90's Microsoft in some cases. And MS went so far down the rabbit hole of fucking over standards that the internet is still picking up the pieces nearly two decades later.

 

And it's neat they're now bashing out a standard with Google, but was it so hard to sit down n have a chat with them about it years back?

I'll let folks do a "spot the difference".

 

You use "proprietary" differently to how I (and I reckon many others) would. MS Office, iOS, Opera are all closed source. Linux, Libre Office and Firefox are all open source. ODT is an open standard, while .doc is proprietary. There is also nothing inherent in a closed or open source system stopping it from using an open or proprietary standard. Also PowerPC is no more closed nor open than X86, both require a license to use.

 

Apple make the software that emoji runs on top of. Of course they knew if it was going to be used outside of its original carrier. That or Apple had been okaying apps onto their store that had access to parts of the system they weren't meant to. Which is definitely the worse of the two options.

Nothing wrong with adding in more emoticons. It's a 52 key keyboard after all, and that's not taking into account the shift/alt keys. Also how often do you require the ability to post a vein bulge or bowing construction worker? Also I'm pretty sure a kiss is X. That's probably the simplest emoticon/emoji of all, predating both by centuries.

[fuchikoma]

Yes, the bracketed ellipsis was not meant to imply you were saying it, but to visibly note that I was removing content. The eye rolling was my own response, not an attempt to make it appear as though you had said it. I used it to draw attention to an accusation, almost immediately followed by an admission that the opposite to what was accused was what was really happening. I figured for such tiny quotes, big quote boxes would be overkill - maybe not.

 

Something proprietary is made with patents or trade secrets. Generally, something for which its operating principles are not publicly disclosed. However, you can have proprietary software or other processes that are made to correctly view, manipulate and store things in open formats - those which are publicly defined and free for anyone to make use of.

 

Apple doesn't make all the software emoji appeared on - they were relative newcomers. They disabled it on all but the phones appropriate for it. I'm not sure, but I think for a while they did disallow emoji unlockers, and a number of them disappeared, but whenever one would disappear, more would show up, and it was obvious people wanted it. So rather than force people to jailbreak to get it, they just went "you know, it's a keyboard that generates Unicode... let's just allow it." Evidently the method used to unlock it didn't run afoul of their extremely cautious policies. And since they were made for Japan, you would actually use a vein bulge (irritation) or a bowing construction worker (common on roadwork and "temporarily closed for renovation" signs), and X isn't a standard notation for kissing there, at least not that I've seen in the last 15 years. It was not made for English audiences, it was made for Japan. It was also probably part of the original spec - which was made for SoftBank. SoftBank is in Japan.

 

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ Goddammit. This is worse than the piracy thread. Say whatever about them. Say they molest kids. Say they assassinate politicians. Who needs facts when something feels truthy? This thread is making me hate this place so I'm going to try to get out.

[Eleven]

Does emoji have a "guy flipping table" animation? I guess not. They probably don't do that in Japan, they're too polite.

 

You should have used this instead , standards and all... Don't want to upset you know who with your non-standard unsupported emoticon.

[Thursday Next]

Haha. WOW! Dudes, it's little pictures of smiley faces. Dean was only using it as an example of how Apple exclusive features can have a negative impact (albeit tiny) on people who are not part of the Apple ecosystem. Yes there are worse examples. And yes, I'm sure Android, WP7, BB, Symbian, etc are not entirely immune to this. It was just a quick example that he had stumbled across at the time.

[TheMightyEthan]

You should have used this instead , standards and all... Don't want to upset you know who with your non-standard unsupported emoticon.

 

Actually "(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻" is entirely standard and acceptable. Notice how it will display correctly on any device that uses the standard character set? That's actually the exact opposite of the problem with emoji.

[deanb]

Tiny quotes is like a few words, and if you're wanting to annotate peoples posts maybe do it after the quotation? When I edit my posts it doesn't add "edited by dean at 14:27" like all you others unless I manually add that in. I'm not going to have people quoting me, adding bits in then giving the impressions I've since edited out my eyes rolling at you or something.

 

However, you can have proprietary software or other processes that are made to correctly view, manipulate and store things in open formats - those which are publicly defined and free for anyone to make use of.

Which is what I was getting at. There's nothing that says iOS, as a closed source platform, cannot be used with open standards.

 

I'm pretty sure people want specific subsets of apps and the ability to run whatever they want on their phone, but Apple frequently puts out updates to stop that, so I don't see why Emoji could not have been kept carrier specific. If Apple notived there was a want for little pictures to annotate texts and tweets and such then maybe they could have gone, "Hmm, if we enable the current carrier specific Japanese thing, it won't work with any other phones in the world but iPhones. Maybe we could have a word with other phone and OS makers and suggest bringing about some kind of universal standard to enable and then everyone can have access to them and it won't look silly if they're on a non-iOS platform?". But they didn't until very recently. And I'd wager given that they've gone years with this Softbank thing and many other ways Apple run things that they were the ones answering the phone call on that topic, not making the call.

 

Wait, if the "kiss-mark" isn't an X, then what is it?

 

Stretching for hyperbole isn't really gonna do much. I'm not saying they're assassinating politicians or molesting kids, I am ,as Thursday has rightly said, just pointing out an issue where Apple have decided to implement something non-standard that has repercussions for everyone else not in the iOS/OSX ecosystem. If it was limited to an entirely iOS-to-iOS messaging platform (is that iMessage? whatever the BBM equivalent is), then it wouldn't matter. But Apple implemented it in a fashion that iOS users can use non-standard characters sent across standardised open, multi-platform messaging protocols.

 

I'm trying to find another example as an analogy, but I'm staring at my phone and my first app drawer is Twicca, Reddit is Fun, Hotmail, Gmail, Facebook, G+, GTalk, Wordpress, BitTorrent, and Feedly. Even my "S Memo" app, exclusive to my phone (atm) still supports JPG, PDF and Evernote for interoperability. It's just a concept that makes sense these days.

 

Also your Korean/Japanese characters doing a table-flip posted perfectly fne btw.

They also support a whole slew of languages, but if I were to enter something in Japanese or Korean on my phone, a lot of PC users would just see a bunch of squares. I guess they shouldn't support that either.

Hooray for universally accepted unicode!

[Eleven]

You should have used this instead , standards and all... Don't want to upset you know who with your non-standard unsupported emoticon.

 

Actually "(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻" is entirely standard and acceptable. Notice how it will display correctly on any device that uses the standard character set? That's actually the exact opposite of the problem with emoji.

 

Oh yes. I'm aware of that. I was just being... What's the word... I want to say annoying but there could be a better word for that.

 

 

And yes, this is just about emoticons. Which is what I said before, trivial bullshit. Too bad Dean was away and couldn't reply to me before others stepped in, so now we have this. As I said, he probably didn't hate it as much as I think he did. But based on his recent Apple posts, especially on the black bars thing, and on his 2nd post about the topic at hand, i assumed the worst. If there is anyone here with, forgive me, blind hatred for Apple, i would say it's him. That's how I view it, sorry. So nitpicking on that small thing was what annoyed me so much and prompted me to comment.

 

Now that we know that he's "cool" with it, and especially now that Android and WP7 actually supports emoji even before he posted that, we can all move on. I can. I don't really wanna reply anymore, after posting that bit about WP7 and Android support, because that should have settled everything.

Edited September 28, 2012 by eleven

[deanb]

Taking the piss out the black bars makes me an Apple Hater? Bit of a low bar for entry isn't there?I and many millions around the world (including many news establishments) have taken the piss out of the Apple Maps, does that mean they're all now "Apple haters"? I certainly don't love Apple products as much as others can, and that's mainly because they do jack shit for me. There's very little that Apple sell that has an appeal for my needs. My main "hate" comes when Apples actions interfere with everything else. OSX has an app store, I don't have much of an opinion on it, it's OSX only and I don't have OSX. FCP X is said to be a bit shit, I don't have much an opinion either (anymore), I don't use OSX and FCP is only on OSX. But Emoji? Group Messaging? Patents for common touchscreen interactions? Well that's when it enters into my realm of stuff. And then I have an opinion. I've most of the day free, I'll rustle up something for some balance shall I?

 

And no I don't hate the emoji thing at all. It is an annoyance that shouldn't exist. And pointing out that you can get third party apps that support an implementation of Emoji (and not necessarily the same one as iOS uses with SoftBank) didn't really settle the matter. Especially when the main one is GoSMS and I'm hugely weary of putting GoAnything on my phone no matter how neat they may look.

 

This is the native "Emoji" of JellyBean, and as you'll notice most of them are all emoticons that already exist within Android anyway. The rest are shown are a handful of emoji, and everything else is just words converted to relevant Unicode, eg "up" = "↑". It's also not enabled by default which would imply it's not finished yet. So most of iOS Emoji still won't work (Fuchikoma posted was just page one of the iOS emoticons and that far exceeds the 6 rows shown above).

 

Also "nitpicking on a small thing" is exactly the definition of "nitpicking". I know it's nitpicking, but it's l clearly a nit that really pissed some of you off. Despite those that got a bit too wound up being the ones within the iOS ecosystem (and one with just one friend out of it), so you're largely unaffected by it all.

[TheMightyEthan]

What's wrong with Go stuff?

[Eleven]

But there already was an agreed standard for it, looks like. You still don't want it? It should have settled the matter because your complaint was lack of standard. But there already was one. WP7 works now. Android's not yet based on your post.

 

If it had worked fine on your phone, you wouldn't be complaining about it. Unfortunately, it isn't done yet, looks like, so you can still complain, right?

 

Your previous posts STILL criticize Apple for lack of standards on this thing specific thing, even though they did the right thing by "resolving" the thing with emojis already by talking with the othes to come up with a standard. This is why I view you as I do. You still think this is a bad thing by saying it shouldn't exist. What would it take for you to accept this, because the presence of a standard doesn't seem to make you content, even though it not being standard was the point of your post.

 

Now. You've said your piece and defended yourself on being called a hater. I appreciate that. I won't get into the black bars thing as this will never end, but i just want to say that yes, it's kinda sad thing to complain about when those apps will get updated soon anyway, and at least it doesn't break compatibility with the new phone. The ios maps i agree with you was kinda a halfassed move, but i don't agree with you lumping the two together as being of the same weight with regards to apple issues so no, i wouldn't call those haters. They're just voicing their concerns on a half baked map. I don't use maps often so it's fine for me, but if i did use it extensively i would be complaining too. Losing directions is a lot lot lot worse than having black bars on your app (for a time).

 

I've said my piece. To summarize, i don't really see you cutting Apple some slack on things that i think you should have done already, hence i see you as a hater. But hey, you got your opinions and i got mine. I really don't want to drag this out again so i really really hope we can stop now.

[deanb]

What's wrong with Go stuff?

They've a habit of asking too many permissions than would be required. Combined with being Chinese which don't have the best reputation for data privacy.

 

@Eleven: Fine, whatever. I'm generally always up for ending a discussion when it devolves to ad homiem attacks anyway.

[fuchikoma]

There's been some reaction to my other post, so I'm going to try one big summary to clarify and if that changes nothing, nothing else will either, I think. Sorry, but I wrote most of this before the agreement to stop popped up. I am only too happy to get out of this at this point. As for ad hominems, I've already been called selfish for saying Apple should add a feature to their OS and butthurt for trying to explain my position. (I wasn't then, but I admit I'm definitely not cool at this point.)

 

---

 

Sorry if it seemed over the top, but I was frustrated, and disappointed that on a board with such impartiality and reason on other issues, this became the sticking point and I was also getting tired of explaining the same things repeatedly. I've explained a bunch of times now how emoji came to be, how Apple restricted it outside its native ecosystem, why it got out, and how they embraced it instead of waging war against their users. But you're still demanding explanations for it, so... when you ignore all the reasons, there are no reasons. They didn't discuss it with other carriers to begin with because they can't see into the future and it wasn't their standard. When they did take it their own way, they worked with others to establish a standard, but they're still the bad guy for disregarding standards. To me that's just willful ignorance and disregard for facts and that's one of the few things that will really get to me.

 

Your previous posts STILL criticize Apple for lack of standards on this thing specific thing, even though they did the right thing by "resolving" the thing with emojis already by talking with the othes to come up with a standard. This is why I view you as I do. You still think this is a bad thing by saying it shouldn't exist. What would it take for you to accept this, because the presence of a standard doesn't seem to make you content, even though it not being standard was the point of your post.

 

That's the issue to me, and this has been building on a heavy slant to pro-Android, anti-Apple for a while now as I see it. When I point out security holes in Android - I really just have to do a quick search and grab a handful of the most recent links to prove them - FDS waves it off as foolish to assume other OSes where so many exploits haven't been found are any more secure and Dean explains it away like just because the DoD uses a special customized version with no communication features, with extended security features, on one specific piece of hardware, that makes it secure on all consumer handsets regardless of all the holes that are found in it... but at the same time, when Apple pushes for standards compliance, they're somehow really pushing to break standards and make things fail on non-Apple hardware with the very same actions. I can bring evidence and explain something very carefully repeatedly every time I'm asked about it, but it doesn't get anyone to budge a millimeter. I get it. They're bad because they're bad and that's all there is to it, so this just isn't the place to discuss it, it seems. I came for a technical or philosophical discussion and stumbled into a religious one by mistake so I'll just drop it and go back to gaming stuff unless there are more things to answer for.

 

Then whenever Apple does something that's more capable than what's common, they're slammed for not drastically cutting down their functionality to keep it standard. Emoji came to be used regardless of their locks on it, so they tried to standardize it, but instead they should just use a simpler set with less than 1/10 the characters, using emoticons that aren't used in Japan, when emoji is already in Japan regardless of what Apple does? Even if they forced the English users to do this, they'd still try to unlock emoji because the cat's out of the bag already. So what Apple did was try to make it so other platforms could see it too. How closed and uncooperative of them! And they're so bad for using a proprietary connector that allows things like analog video output to an ordinary TV. Instead, they should just use an unfinalized proposal for a standard that's only supported on a handful of devices, because it's a standard (or will be) and would let them just use a USB connector, even if they could only do video OR other data at a given time with it, and couldn't change the signalling format without changing the connector, like they've already had to do before. But using USB would reduce e-waste! Except their connector was originally Firewire, then dual, then they added video and removed Firewire, and because it was their own format, they were able to keep using it instead of forcing people to rebuy new accessories like stereo docks several times - thus reducing e-waste. This is why I'm getting frustrated - because even when it's shown that what they're doing in some instances is more beneficial than the alternative, they're villified for not taking the less practical option - even when they are shown to be doing the opposite of what's accused, they are still the bad guy for doing it. I don't know why I'm still trying to explain it; I just don't like misinformation and unjustified slander. But I know this isn't going to convince anyone because I've already made these arguments at length, and that's what's getting to me.

 

they've extremely opened up and standardized from their old days and now they're not much worse than any other proprietary player.

Being an "open and standardized proprietary player" is a bit of an oxymoron.

No... actually...

[A bunch of cases of proprietary systems working with open standards] So it's not quite the oxymoron it seems unless you take it to mean open-source instead of adopting open standards like we've been talking about.

There is also nothing inherent in a closed or open source system stopping it from using an open or proprietary standard.

Exactly.

 

Apple make the software that emoji runs on top of. Of course they knew if it was going to be used outside of its original carrier. That or Apple had been okaying apps onto their store that had access to parts of the system they weren't meant to. Which is definitely the worse of the two options.

This is the native "Emoji" of JellyBean, and as you'll notice most of them are all emoticons that already exist within Android anyway. The rest are shown are a handful of emoji, and everything else is just words converted to relevant Unicode, eg "up" = "↑". It's also not enabled by default which would imply it's not finished yet.

Apple disables access to something and bans apps that unlock it - it means of course they knew people would get to it. Google disables access to something by default - well, it's ok, that means it's not meant to be used yet. Sure. As for whether the emoji unlockers accessed the wrong parts of the system... without technical understanding of how the unlockers worked, neither one of us can really say much with authority on that. Actually, they unlocked it with Apple's own SDK using an unforeseen trick. I've explained it all already, but let's see if this makes any difference since you've given me another good example to illustrate with:

 

As SoftBank's emoji, they disabled it. They actually banned emoji unlockers back then. They faced a lot of resistance to this. When they finally did allow emoji to be enabled by users, it was simply Unicode being used as it was designed for. Yes, not all OSes could see it properly - that's what the private use area is for.

They also support a whole slew of languages, but if I were to enter something in Japanese or Korean on my phone, a lot of PC users would just see a bunch of squares. I guess they shouldn't support that either.

Hooray for universally accepted unicode!

That's exactly the same issue, in fact. Apple doesn't use the older EUC, JIS, or SJIS encodings for Japanese - they use UTF-16. Unicode. However, not all Unicode fonts support all Unicode characters. So if you're using WinXP (maybe Vista and 7 too?) in order to display it all correctly, you need to install the Asian language support pack. Without it, your system is still Unicode-compliant, but you don't have all the glyphs on hand to display it properly. Additionally, we tend to use UTF-8 here, which will utterly flop if you try to use it to interpret UTF-16. It's still a "universal" standard, but when you want to display every character in every language, plus a bunch of graphics and private use area, 8 bits per character doesn't cut it.

 

The group messaging thing sounds like a simple issue of user interface or default behaviour, not standards compliance, but as a feature that's not even available here, I took it your word for it because I don't need to be right about every point regardless of the evidence. (Being proven wrong is quite useful - but it requires proof, or at least logic.) The patent issue is just BS - Apple seems way out of line there - they do a lot of things I don't like TBH, and I've mentioned a bunch of them that weren't even brought up before - I'm just defending them from what I see to be untrue and illogical attacks.

 

As for what a kiss symbol is in Japan... well, there's the lips emoji. Other than that, probably something like （´ε`） or "chu!" written in hiragana (an onomatopoeia.) Even on Android phones, the Japanese keyboard often contains a huge palette of JIS-character faces so they wouldn't even have to type them. (JIS is Japanese Industrial Standard - sorta like ISO. So while there was JIS character encoding, you can still encode the JIS character set in Unicode.)

 

Ok... I think that's everything. Let's talk about video games like we used to...

[deanb]

Well there's a reason I rarely interact with FDS.

 

Saying the same thing over n over again is entirely up to you. Repeating things doesn't always make it any more right or correct. I understand how it came to be, you don't need to repeat it over n over and then get frustrated at others that you feel the need to repeat it over n over. No one else is forcing you to do that

 

There's nothing much "pro-Android" going on, in my original post the examples I gave where the web, Windows and then Android. I could maybe have snagged Housemate No.2 iPad/Air to check too if you wanted a through infographic but it was just a small thing not a research paper. I have actually pointed out a few times it'd need to be something supported via W3C if it was to wholly work via Twitter, but that never really got much further discussion.

 

I also pointed out that the security flaw you'd posted about required close range of inches, which at that point pretty much all electronics are "vulnerable". That's why routers come with buttons, it assumes if you're physically close enough to push the button then you're close enough to be "secure" and not be someone hacking in from afar. And that point still stands, the "vulnerability" required close contact, you'd have to know who or what it is you're syncing with. Also look whos bringing in Android to the Apple thread.

 

Japan uses Emoticons. What world you in? And their "Emoji" isn't "more capable" because it's only working on iOS/OSX. There's more to it sure, but it's no more "capable" if it means 90% of users of SMS/web can't see them. To a degree it makes it less capable because if people can't see it then half the message is lost.

The funny thing with the new lighting connector and the comparison with USB is that while on one end it's lighting, on the other end its still:

And Micro-USB is a standard, one that Apple has technically agreed to, even if their translation of what they're agreeing to doesn't match anyone else. And USB also does video output too if you want it too. So you can have a connector that's USB on one end and micro-USB on the other, or one that's USB on one end and Lighting on the other..connector to an adaptor because there's currently bot all that support Lightning. A USB cable is a USB cable, and can be used on numerous devices, a lightning cable can only be used on iPods. If we're wanting to compare a reduce in e-waste, HTC phones won't come with a charger, because everyone has a charger that connects to the phone. While the iPhone 5 will pretty much require the addition of one or more adaptors.

It's not really slander to say that, the Lightning connector is not used on any other devices, in order to use it with products already available in circulation it requires an adaptor. In order to comply with the EU e-waste directive it requires an adaptor therefore negating the purpose of the e-waste bill.

Its aim was to stop the need for stuff like this:

 

I don't get what you're saying "exactly" to in your post? An "open and standardized proprietary player" is still an oxymoron. You can't be "open" and "proprietary" at the same time. ODT is an open-standard. .doc isn't. one is open, one is proprietary, can't have a proprietary open standard.

 

Apple develop the software that the emoji is running on, I would hope they knew what people could and could not get access to and in which countries. I would hope somewhere in their documentation it says "Emoji is accessible in all international versions of iOS, not just Japan on Softbank carrier." If not, then what else is in iOS that Apple didn't mean to leave in? IT's in part of the OS that wasn't meant to be there, one would assume that given it uses an exploiting the SDK, rather than a documented API in the SDK, that it's something they were not meant to be able to do.

 

Not really the same issue at all, the Japanese and Korean characters aren't using the private space and display on a wide variety of devices and platforms. I can grab you some screenshots if you want?

 

And yeah video games are always fun to play. I could say something about iOS and video games, but I think Elevens head would explode.

[Faiblesse Des Sens]

I am way too hungover to read through this.