OS X 10.10.3 Puts More Focus on Emoji, Lays Groundwork for Skin Tone Modifiers

[kingtj]

Yeah.... exactly ....

I'm partially just poking fun with the negative emoji comments, but at the same time? This is 100% true, too!

I work for a company where we use Macs in about a 50/50 mix with Windows machines. Truth is, my boss is a long time Mac guy and would like to see 100% Mac adoption in the business. But realistically, it will never happen. Apple's focus in recent years just keeps more and more of us on the Windows platform for computing, and even Android for mobile phones in some cases.

It's pretty clear that Apple has no interest in doing anything with the back-end/server side of things. The people who keep buying rows and rows of Mac Minis and mounting them in server racks, or who spend $$$'s to put new Mac Pros in racks on their sides, in special rack adapters are a niche minority who insist on doing it despite logic and common sense dictating otherwise. We have 1 system running OS X Server and it's ONLY because we want the native MDM capability (remote device management) that it gives to our users with iPads and iPhones.

For user workstations? Sure, Macs are generally fine. (Still love the relative lack of malware hassles, among other benefits.) But networking has always been a weak spot for Apple that they just don't seem to make a priority. EG. When you establish an L2TP client VPN connection from any Mac where your network adapter has a static IP, the VPN routing is completely broken. Users are perpetually confused with shared drives on our servers, too. (If you connect to a shared resource and drag it to the Finder sidebar as a shortcut? The shortcut tends to break and generate "can't connect" type of errors when it's clicked. That's really unfortunate because it would, by far, be the easiest way to set someone's workstation up so they can easily access the network drive resources whenever they need them.)

Well, I gave up on Apple as a business oriented OS when they decided to put all their emphasis on the mobile toys. I know it generates them massive revenue, but they left an entire segment of their userbase out in the cold. I ran several MacOS X based servers. That product was an absolute joke, and still is...actually even more so now. I'm running server version 3.x (don't remember which exact revision, but it's the latest on 10.9) and it's a child's toy compared to other *NIX based server operating systems. In fact, I moved all critical functionality off of OS X and migrated it over to Unix VM's.

So, in an admittedly judgmental wording: I suppose you don't get pissy about these things when you don't do "real" things with your Mac. I have real stuff to run, that needs real uptime, and uses industry accepted standards, not some weird faux-UNIX system with oddities left and right (like the nonstandard formatted Apache logs Apple uses that forced me to edit the regex for OSSEC monitoring). I see you say you run your business on your Macs. Hey, that's great, but I can speak from experience that their server offering is an effing joke that they should just pull already.

At first glance it's understandable that folks would say, "but obviously they are doing OTHER things besides emojis!" Well, their awful performance and poor track record over the last few YEARS makes me think otherwise. It does indeed seem like they are only putting effort into trivial items. Of course they do bug fixing, but it's extremely selective and they drag their feet forever getting these patches out that shouldn't have been problem to begin with.

 

[Bubba Satori]

Emoji is serious business.

Which begs the question...

Where are the transgender, handicapped, indigenous, mentally challenged Emoji?

 

[lunarworks]

The point of us is that we do not want anybody working on EMOJI.
Before EMOJI the world was alive and okay and would deb without EMOJI.

Should I be upset that Apple spent time including tabbed Finder windows in 10.10? I never use them.

There's lots of OS features I never use, but I'm not arrogant enough to insist no one work on them.

 

[Paradoxally]

Really? What kind of issue are you having? Which Retina Mac do you have?
I ask because I'm planning to buy one, but if it has serious issues, I'll wait.

Finder lag, and Mission Control lag mostly. Happens after a few hours, only solution is a reboot. Apart from that, it's a solid OS.

By all means buy a retina, just make sure you use Mavericks as it has none of these issues.

 

[Shookster]

Am I the only person who thinks supporting Unicode 8.0 is reasonably important? Because if other platforms support it before Apple, when someone types one of the new characters in an email or message, you won't be able to see it. Depending on how it's used, it could result in you completely misunderstanding a communication from someone else.

(Also, I have heard of unsupported emojis sometimes being sent as MMS and incurring extra charges but I'm not sure in what situations that occurs and it might be network-specific.)

The people complaining are also missing the fact that OS X 10.10.3 contains a wide range of bug fixes as well as the new Photos app. This is just one feature of many.

 

[MH01]

Maybe 2 Apple employees are working on this out of about 98,000 employees. How do you think this 'takes precedence'?

This has no bugs

 

[JAT]

Which begs the question...

Where are the transgender, handicapped, indigenous, mentally challenged Emoji?

You want people making fun of the handicapped?!?

 

[viorelgn]

I suppose that is great news if you like iPhoto. I don’t like it and don’t use it. I used Aperture and they have, in effect, killed it. Nice going Apple, way to alienate the Pro’s.

 

[cunninglinguist]

Welcome to the new Apple.

You have to look at it as a business... Mac in the workplace is a very (unfortunately) TINY segment in Apple's business now. It's not that fewer businesses are using it, it's just that far more education and personal users are joining the brighter side of computing.

Apple is a business and has to target their consumer, and in this case they're doing that. I don't like it, but it's the way it is. Ironically, Microsoft went the same direction with Windows several years back and it ended up failing miserably, and now Microsoft is having to reinvent themselves and prove that they are serious about business users all over again.

I agree though... Apple seems to trying to be everything to everyone, and not focusing on what they're good at before moving on to the next project. If Apple is to succeed in the long run, they have to get back to basics. Make something better than anyone else. iOS 8 was a mess. Yosemite was a mess. Loyalists argue that most of the mess has been cleaned up, but in reality it hasn't. When you have huge swaths of users with WiFi bugs, Exchange woes, iMessage problems... these are all fundamental issues that every ounce of energy (not to mention PR) should be going toward resolving... but instead it's not. We're getting "Crackle" on Apple TV... and we're getting ethnic Emojis, and we get to chose between a sporty iWatch band and a Gold one... common Apple, realign with the principals that made you what you are today.

Yeah, I think you nailed it there. When I'm down on Apple, I'm definitely not saying other companies haven't done the same darn thing, because they have. But since this is an Apple forum...

I'm no fan of Microsoft. I use Windows 8.1 as my primary OS, and it's "whatever". It seems to work decently. I hasn't wow'd me.

What I really care about are the server oriented OS's, and you just can't touch Unix.

 

[MH01]

Which begs the question...

Where are the transgender, handicapped, indigenous, mentally challenged Emoji?

They don't exist in the apple cool universe. Everyone is the cool hip guy from the Im a mac / I'm a pic ads!

 

[cunninglinguist]

I'm partially just poking fun with the negative emoji comments, but at the same time? This is 100% true, too!

I work for a company where we use Macs in about a 50/50 mix with Windows machines. Truth is, my boss is a long time Mac guy and would like to see 100% Mac adoption in the business. But realistically, it will never happen. Apple's focus in recent years just keeps more and more of us on the Windows platform for computing, and even Android for mobile phones in some cases.

It's pretty clear that Apple has no interest in doing anything with the back-end/server side of things. The people who keep buying rows and rows of Mac Minis and mounting them in server racks, or who spend $$$'s to put new Mac Pros in racks on their sides, in special rack adapters are a niche minority who insist on doing it despite logic and common sense dictating otherwise. We have 1 system running OS X Server and it's ONLY because we want the native MDM capability (remote device management) that it gives to our users with iPads and iPhones.

For user workstations? Sure, Macs are generally fine. (Still love the relative lack of malware hassles, among other benefits.) But networking has always been a weak spot for Apple that they just don't seem to make a priority. EG. When you establish an L2TP client VPN connection from any Mac where your network adapter has a static IP, the VPN routing is completely broken. Users are perpetually confused with shared drives on our servers, too. (If you connect to a shared resource and drag it to the Finder sidebar as a shortcut? The shortcut tends to break and generate "can't connect" type of errors when it's clicked. That's really unfortunate because it would, by far, be the easiest way to set someone's workstation up so they can easily access the network drive resources whenever they need them.)

Great comment. You know exactly what I'm talking about. Speaking of Apple's networking weak spot, we had to move our SMB shares away from OS X Server because Apple uses a deprecated version of SMB!! The Windows 8 machines refused to connect to it. So, off to Linux it was for the most up to date version of SMB. Voila. Now works perfectly. Imagine that. "Why don't you just manually update the version of SMB on OS X Server?" Because Apple told us that was an untested and unsupported operating system modification that would impact support.

I'll put it plainly for people who don't understand: Apple simply does NOT care about business or enterprise. This is ultimately a BAD thing. Yeah, as long as your iToys work you're content, I get that, but there are cases where computers are used to do things more than just post about your latest crush on Facebook.

 

[bpeeps]

Alright here we go.

Really? Above all else, this takes precedence? I didn't even think emoji were supposed to look like real people, hints the unrealistic yellow skin and missing nose.

There are only two people at Apple and they are both working on nothing but emojis.

Great to see Apple putting effort into emoji and not fixing the opendirectoryd bug...

Yes, Apple can only focus on one thing at a time.

How about video driver issues on retina macbook pros? I've had more lockups since Fall than I've had in the previous 10 years! And while they're at it, instead of screwing around with goofy emojis, how about fixing the absolutely horrendous calculator app‽ It's really an embarrassment -- the window controls don't even line up and C/AC don't work right!

If you have issues, make use of their online reporting tool, diagnostics on whatever platform you're reporting on.

Glad to see Apple putting time and effort into the truly important features of an operating system.

Seriously folks, if you were on the fence about switching to a different OS because of Apple's long string of debacles over the past few years, this should be your "table flip, exit stage left" moment.

You are not going to switch to anything else. In a week, you'll forget about this and move on to the next complaint.

What is up with some of you people here. The article is talking about an Emoji upgrade. What makes you think Apple isn't working on fixing other things....and to be honest, this past update fixed quite a few bugs and Yosemite is running excellent for me and I use my Macs to run my business. A valium or camomile tea can be your friend greatly.

MR users think that since they can only do one thing at a time, a huge corporation can only do one thing at a time. Simple minds.

Perhaps he's voicing frustration at not seeing tangible goodies headlining "what's new" articles from the other 97,998 Apple employees? In other words, relative to all what Apple can apparently deliver, THIS is big enough to headline an article? Or, in still other words: of all the things that Apple could be focused on, this may seem like awfully small stuff.

Voice your frustration at MacRumors and other sites reporting this because they know it will get hits. An article about new drivers or whatever else, 95% of people will not care about. Race articles hit big.

But the emoji accomplishments have progressed enough to warrant a news article, but graphic driver improvements haven't. That is what some people are saying.

Apple isn't responsible for what news outlets report. Graphic driver improvements don't sell ads, articles relating to race will.

In before the "Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic ..." lock

I was surprised I didn't see this when I first clicked on the post. I knew exactly what kind of stupidity I would find in the comments.

lol @ all the white people complaining about other races.

I'd say it has more to do with ignorance and privilege than "white people". Most of the people here commenting don't realize their privilege.

Who's complained about having diversified emoji?
How do you know the ethnicity of the people complaining?

People are upset about the lack of other improvements (which may just be unknown behind the scenes), not the concept of adding other ethnicities to the available emoji.

An educated guess, I would assume. I don't doubt they're far off, however.

Photos for OS X gently weeps.

Considering there was an article about its improvements yesterday, I highly doubt that.

Why waist money and time on this?!

No one is wasting money or time on this.

Apple has finally jumped the shark !

You mean the one that MacRumor's users are piloting? Yes, clearly.

Why do they have people emojii at all? I thought that's the benefit of the yellow ones.

They're just evening the playing field. They've always had white and yellow emojis.

We have officially reached the end of times when people are actually complaining about the lack of multicultural ***** cartoons!

This country is becoming a pussified multicultural hodgepodge of mediocrity and stupidity

The only people complaining are those complaining against it. Have you even read the comments?

Really? Couldn't Apple focus on REAL FEATURES and not BS gimmicks like these??

No. Apple can't focus on any other features besides emojis. Sorry bout it.

Because they are EMOJI. EMOTICONS. Root word: emotion. Not skin color, not race, not signifying "person", signifying emotion. If you think emotions are racially based, you have a problem.

Also, they should be fixing bugs, dammit!!

Who says they aren't fixing bugs? An Asian emoji with a mustache doesn't really represent any emotion I have.

I think this whole Emoji thread is pretty telling of the average age of Apple users.

This is probably the best comment in this thread.

this is a tidbit about a small division of apple's team who spent their specific skills tweaking emojis (for a very brief period), as reported on a rumor mill site.

funny how many people are acting like this story is now the homepage banner of apple.com, with a parallax explanation about the man-hours and R&D that went into it, narrated by ives.

The average IQ of MR users is pretty low. If it's not about an iPhone or a new Mac, they're slamming their hands on the table grunting for more iFood.

They are addressing life's most urgent necessities!

Yep, they're just bringing their company up to the standards of 2015.

The point of us is that we do not want anybody working on EMOJI.
Before EMOJI the world was alive and okay and would deb without EMOJI.

Even the 2 people that are supposedly working on it are wasting time!

Yosemite has random freezes for me.

Report your anecdotally isolated incidences of freezing (that will most likely be hard to recreate by any other user) using the diagnostics & reports tool. That's what it is there for.

Man white people really hate it when companies cater to non-whites.

It's like the world is coming to an end for them. "How DARE they address issues for other races before my own needs! Me me me!"

They will never understand the privilege they hold.

If emoji "skin" tone is at the top of your priority list as a minority, you have some seriously out of whack priorities.

I like how you're the only one here trying to race bait, folks, too. Great job. When you have no argument you resort to that, I see. Typical.

It was something most could live without. No minority asked for this and I'm sure it wasn't a priority for Apple given how long its taken them to roll it out. But the fact that it's here now is great news. The fact that you can't understand the difference between priority and welcomed, well, that's on you.

----------------------------------
In summary:

1. The amount of people who don't realize an article about drivers and improvements won't sell as many ads as one about race is staggering. Go back to school and learn what interests people.

2. Most of you don't know how privileged you are.

3. Apple is capable of working on more than one thing at a time.

4. I've thoroughly enjoyed reading the stupidity here and in all race related posts. Is there another Dr. Dre article in the works?

 

[Brenster]

Great to see Apple putting effort into emoji and not fixing the opendirectoryd bug...

Glad to see Apple putting time and effort into the truly important features of an operating system.

Seriously folks, if you were on the fence about switching to a different OS because of Apple's long string of debacles over the past few years, this should be your "table flip, exit stage left" moment.

I've had a Surface Pro 3 for the past couple of months as I really needed Office 2013 and something seriously lightweight for business. My late 2011 15" MBP and Office:mac 2011 didn't cut it on any front.

The DNS issue causing web pages to not load or only reload after several refreshed still persists in Yosemite and on both of my iOS 8 devices. No fixes in 10.10.2 or 8.1.3. No word if it's even being looked at, leave alone fixed, for 10.10.3 or 8.2. But emoji enhancements?! I'm not saying this shouldn't be added or worked on but there are showstopping issues in Yosemite and iOS 8.x that are going unchecked & have real world impacts whilst dev time is being devoted to this

For anyone who regards their mac as a big iOS device this will be most welcome. For those of us who actually need our macs to do something productive with (business wise), the halcyon, rock solid & dependable days of 10.3.9 or 10.6.8 are seemingly consigned to history.

My SP3 is getting more and more use at the moment. I've no urge to swap it out for whatever 4 figure laptop/ultrabook mac might be coming with OS X in this unreliable state,

 

[Olivier Giround]

Well, I gave up on Apple as a business oriented OS when they decided to put all their emphasis on the mobile toys. I know it generates them massive revenue, but they left an entire segment of their userbase out in the cold. I ran several MacOS X based servers. That product was an absolute joke, and still is...actually even more so now. I'm running server version 3.x (don't remember which exact revision, but it's the latest on 10.9) and it's a child's toy compared to other *NIX based server operating systems. In fact, I moved all critical functionality off of OS X and migrated it over to Unix VM's.

So, in an admittedly judgmental wording: I suppose you don't get pissy about these things when you don't do "real" things with your Mac. I have real stuff to run, that needs real uptime, and uses industry accepted standards, not some weird faux-UNIX system with oddities left and right (like the nonstandard formatted Apache logs Apple uses that forced me to edit the regex for OSSEC monitoring). I see you say you run your business on your Macs. Hey, that's great, but I can speak from experience that their server offering is an effing joke that they should just pull already.

At first glance it's understandable that folks would say, "but obviously they are doing OTHER things besides emojis!" Well, their awful performance and poor track record over the last few YEARS makes me think otherwise. It does indeed seem like they are only putting effort into trivial items. Of course they do bug fixing, but it's extremely selective and they drag their feet forever getting these patches out that shouldn't have been problem to begin with.

Anyone trying to use Apple in a corporate environment gets what they deserve.

 

[cunninglinguist]

Alright here we go.

WRONG. I've already switched, buddy. The only remaining OS X installation I have is on a Mac Pro for limited use as a server. Good try, though.

----------

Anyone trying to use Apple in a corporate environment gets what they deserve.

So, I made the decision to use an Apple product in a corporate environment? Last I checked I wasn't the IT director, buddy.

 

[JAT]

Alright here we go.

It's amazing how you recognize some posts as jokes, but not others. Or is it just racial bias? Although, for the life of me, I can't tell how all you smart people can recognize race through posts at MR.

 

[Hastings101]

Which begs the question...

Where are the transgender, handicapped, indigenous, mentally challenged Emoji?

I'm so ready for this to be emojitized

 

[pubwvj]

Glimmer over substance.

I'm more interested in having rock solid stability, no bugs, legacy support. Emoticons, emoji, what ever are just so superficial.

 

[Olivier Giround]

General Comment for the Stupid:

Apple is not pulling people off of wifi and retina issues to work on emoji. People can work on all of these tasks at the same time.

Please pull your heads out of your a**es before you look sillier than you already do.

 

[christarp]

Why? Why?

Why not? May as well have equal representation, especially since it's a small feature. I don't understand how people are upset about this.

 

[maflynn]

Why not? May as well have equal representation, especially since it's a small feature. I don't understand how people are upset about this.

Perhaps because there are more pressing bugs in the system. The emoticons are not meant to be accurate portrayals of humans as it stands. I'm not really knocking the inclusion, what I have an issue is the priority of this over more severe bugs that impact a person's ability to use the computer, i.e., wifi bug.

 

[brinary001]

Poor this same amount of effort into iOS emojis please!

 

[Saucesome2000]

If Apple did not have so many pending issues, I could see them devoting time to this. While I'm sure it's a very small part of their resources, they should currently be dedicating ZERO resources to something as frivolous as this. While those of us who actually care about functionality are waiting on software bugs, there are people complaining about freaking smiley faces.

If anything, delete the white ones and make everyone use the yellow ones that 99.99% of people I know use. This is what happens when companies have to bow down to special interest groups and vocal minorities.

This is a case where Steve would have been useful as he would have told anyone complaining about this to ******* right off.

 

[macintologist]

The lack of sensitivity on this forum to the issues of people of color is truly astounding and disgusting. Check your privilege. You would feel left out if every emoji was black instead of white. You just never have to think about it because white is always the default, which coincidentally matches up with your race.

 

[Yvan256]

At last. Something for the professionals. This makes up for Final Cut X.