Ben Heck’s Hex game: Fun with soldering

After working out the kinks with the layout of the Hex board game, Ben and Felix have received the PCBs from OSHPark and they’re all ready for soldering. That’s interesting, because ultimately the game itself will be used to teach soldering in schools. How’s your own soldering technique? And what do you think of the Hex game? Let us know over on the element14 community.

6 Gestural Interface Tricks to Try Out With Your New iPhone X

Most iPhone X owners have had barely 48 hours to get to grips with Apple’s new home bar-based user interface which does away with traditional home button functions, but the general consensus is that it becomes extremely intuitive to use after just a few hours. In this article, we’ve gathered some neat tips and gestural tricks for using iOS 11 on iPhone X that you may not have come across.

Some of the tips listed below offer an alternative one-handed approach to gestures that typically require two hands, while others simply demonstrate a quicker way of interfacing with your iPhone X that Apple hasn’t made explicit in its support literature. Hopefully at least one of them will be new to you and will help you get more out of your new smartphone.

Faster App Switcher Access

Apple’s Guided Tour of the new iPhone X interface would have you believe that to access the App Switcher you must swipe upwards from the middle of the home bar and then pause for a moment, before swiping along to see your open apps.

Actually there’s another, faster method you can try: simply swipe up from the home bar at a 45-degree angle towards the right of the screen and then let go, and the app switcher should move straight into view almost immediately. Granted, it’s a tiny adjustment to the official way of doing things, but you’ll probably find it a little speedier and more intuitive.

Quit Apps Quicker

At first sight, quitting apps from within the App Switcher seems to require two fingers: one to tap-hold the app, and another to tap the app card’s minus button that the first action elicits. Thankfully though, the whole process can be performed with one hand by tap-holding and swiping up on the app as soon as the minus button appears.

Reach for Control Center

Accessing the Control Center on iPhone X is completely different to how it’s done on older iPhones running iOS 11. Instead of swiping up from the bottom of the screen, users must swipe down from the top-right “ear”, which requires another hand. The change is a curious one, given that Apple considered locating the Control Center at the right of the App Switcher, which looks more intuitive during one-handed use. Apple could always introduce this implementation as an option in a later version of iOS 11, but until then, Reachability is your friend.

To enable the setting in iOS 11.1, go to Settings -> General -> Accessibility, and turn on Reachability. Now simply swipe down from the gestural home bar to bring the top of the interface halfway down the screen, and you should be able to swipe from the top-right with your thumb to bring down Control Center.

This method can also be used as a quick way to check your battery percentage, or to see if your VPN is connected – just a small drag from the top-right reveals the information, without you having to invoke the Control Center wholesale.

Return to Last App

Swiping the home bar to switch between apps is a smart gesture that most iPhone X owners will have already grasped. But did you know that you can perform the same swipe action from the home screen to return to the last-used app? Simply drag your thumb right across the bottom of the dock, where the home bar usually appears.

Exit App Wiggle Mode

Holding an app on the home screen makes all apps wiggle, indicating that you can now re-locate or delete them individually. With no home button to turn “wiggle mode” off, Apple added a “Done” button to the top-right on the screen. But you don’t have to raise your other hand to tap it and exit wiggle mode – just swipe up from the bottom of the dock instead.

Instant Siri Search

This last one is less a new gesture, and more a combination of two, the latter of which has existed since iOS 9. Whenever you’re in an app and want to do a quick search, swipe up, release for a split second, then immediately swipe down again. (Note: this action won’t work if the app you’re using is located in a folder.)

This is a particularly useful swipe combo given that in iOS 11 you can now search both your iPhone and the web, with Siri offering autocomplete options similar to how it does when you perform a search in Safari. Finally, to exit the Siri Search window and return to the app you were just using, simply swipe right across the bottom of the screen.

Know of any more neat UI tricks for iPhone X? Let us know in the comments below.

Related Roundup: iPhone XBuyer’s Guide: iPhone X (Buy Now)
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Meet the amateur astronauts trying to crowdfund their way into orbit

There’s a nondescript warehouse tucked behind an opera house in Copenhagen, Denmark, where a few dozen rocket scientists meet every week to discuss what has become their collective obsession: sending an astronaut into suborbital space.

That might not seem like such a feat. Russia ticked the suborbital box over 55 years ago, and NASA has literally sent people to the moon and back.
SpaceX could launch the world’s most powerful rocket by year’s end.
But considering that every member of Copenhagen Suborbitals (CopSub) is an amateur and a volunteer with a day job outside of the warehouse, the organization’s goal is one of the more ambitious in aerospace.

For nearly a decade, the exclusively crowdfunded group has built over a half-dozen unmanned rockets, launching them from floating barges out in the Baltic Sea. Some, like the Sapphire, pierced the sky in spectacular fashion. Others made more of an impression through their failures to ascend as expected, like the Nexø I, which reached less than 20 percent of its intended altitude before plummeting back into the Baltic.

The Sapphire pierced the sky in spectacular fashion.

I met with CopSub’s communications director, Mads Wilson, at the Copenhagen facility over the summer. “Do you see the big white rocket?” he asked. “That’s where we are.”

Although the group holds its weekly meetings on Sunday, there were still a few members about, toiling with electronics while the machine shop was silent. CopSub members are committed to its mission and, for many of its volunteers, the warehouse acts like a home away from home. But this isn’t NASA. The organization is relatively flat and roles often overlap.

The group is loosely divided into three teams. The rocket engine team works to refine the liquid propellant engines that boost the rocket vertically, whereas the computer and electronics team works on CSduino: a CopSub-developed variation of Arduino that serves as the rocket’s central nervous system. The communications team makes sure the rocket and its creators stay in contact during its mission.

In the future, these teams will have added roles and responsibilities once a human is strapped into the nose of the rocket. If all goes as planned, that amateur astronaut will be snugly positioned in the latest generation of CopSub’s Tycho space capsule (SpaceX recently revealed what that astronaut may wear).

But no one is sure just when that will be. Launching rockets is a tricky endeavor, and no shortage of variables — from rough weather to electrical malfunctions — have caused CopSub to reassess, delay, and even cancel a handful of launches. Even when they’ve managed to launch a rocket, many haven’t flown as planned, like last year’s Nexø I.

“The whole rocket is a system, and 99 percent went as it should,” Wilson said. “Even if just 0.5 percent doesn’t work, that can have a cascading effect.”

“Technology is not the problem. Time and money are the problems.”

In the case of the Nexø I, the rocket ended up on the launch pad longer than intended, causing the liquid oxygen in its tank to overheat and begin to boil. The rocket was thus left with too little fuel for its planned flight. Adding injury to insult, the parachutes failed to open because the computer system thought the rocket was still in flight. The rocket was devastated in its collision with the water, and CopSub has since implemented checklists to the flight plan to avoid such errors in the future.

But a checklist can’t save you from all unforeseen variables. This past summer, CopSub planned to launch the Nexø II, its final step towards the manned Spica class rockets. But after postponing the launch a few times, the team decided to reschedule for summer 2018 due to an array of internal and external stresses, from late deliveries to double-booked launch areas.

The Spica missions are CopSub’s ambitious aim to put an amateur astronaut just above the Karman line that delineates space — over 60 miles above Earth. Estimated to cost somewhere in the $1 to $2 million range, just for parts, Wilson said the team still needs three or four times its current budget for development.

“Technology is not the problem,” he said. “Time and money are the problems.”

Which is where the public comes in. CopSub is fueled by donations and takes to Indiegogo annually to raise funds. The team hopes their efforts will engage people around the world and help democratize spaceflight (incidentally, that’s also the mission of tiny FemtoSats). In jest, Wilson calculates that NASA’s coffee budget could help send Spica to space in just a few years.

Whether CopSub can get a person into suborbital space in the foreseeable future is anyone’s guess. For now, space is beckoning these aerospace amateurs — but Earth’s gravity is holding them back.

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How to burn a CD to store your data or music or use it on any device

The compact disc (CD) was once the preferred method for storing data long-term and for saving audio for playing in CD players. As technology progressed and formats changed, the CD was superseded by the digital video disc (DVD) and then the Blu-ray disc. Nevertheless, it remains an important option for millions of people — and it’s worth keeping your CD-burning skills sharp just in case you need to share data or music with someone who’s only equipped with a CD player. Here, we take a look at how to burn a CD for those occasions when this seemingly archaic technology might come in handy.

The first thing to note in burning a CD is the limitation on exactly how much the format can store. You’ll need to keep that in mind, because while today’s hard disk drives (HDD) and solid-state drives (SSDs) are measured in terabytes (TBs), and both DVD and Blu-ray formats are measured gigabytes (GBs), CDs are measured in megabytes (MBs) of storage. Specifically, the most common CD can store 700MBs of data, which translates to roughly 80 minutes worth of music.

Step 1: Gather your tools and materials

To burn a CD, you’ll need two things. First, you’ll need a CD or DVD recorder drive (a.k.a, a burner). If you don’t have one and you’re using a desktop with an open external drive bay, it’s easy enough to get one purchased and installed. You can also use an external USB drive, which is handy for a notebook that doesn’t have a CD or DVD drive. You’ll spend about $20 for an internal CD/DVD combo drive an external CD/DVD combo drive.

Next, you’ll need a supply of blank CDs. Stick with CD recordable (CD-R) discs to be sure your CDs will be supported on any hardware. You’ll spend around $20 for a 100 CD-R spindle from a reputable manufacturer like Verbatim.

Finally, give some thought to what you want to burn to your CD. If you want to burn data for safekeeping or to pass along to someone else, then the simplest way is to use Windows 10’s File Explorer utility. If you want to burn music that’s most likely to play on either a computer or a dedicated CD player (such as in a car stereo or a boombox), then you can use the Windows Media Player that still ships with the latest versions of Windows 10.

Step 2a: Burn your data CD

Burning a data CD is simple enough. Just place a blank CD-R into your burner and close the tray. Open File Explorer, and then check out the status of your CD burner — you should see an indication that a CD-R is inserted and how much space is free.

Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

Next, decide which data files you can burn to the CD. It’s easiest to create a working folder and then open a second File Explorer window for selecting your data files. Hit Ctrl-A on your keyboard to select all of the files, then right-click. From the context menu, select Sent to and then select your CD burner from the list of options.

Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

A dialog will open asking how you want to use the disc. You have two options for how you burn your CD. You can also enter a disc title via this dialog.

Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

First, you can select “Like a USB flash drive,” then Windows 10 will not “close” the disc. This means that in Windows XP or later, you can add more files to the same CD-R, edit files, or delete files. The downside is that the CD will not work on any other kind of PC, such as MacOS or a Linux-powered system. Once you’re finished with the CD and want to make sure it can work with any system, then you can go to File Explorer, right-click on your CD burner, and select “Close session.” Note that once you close the CD, you will no longer be able to make any changes to it.

Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

Second, you can select “With a CD/DVD player.” Choosing this option will copy your files to the CD and then close the session, making the data available on any PC.

Note that if you copy some kinds of files, such as music (MP3 or WMV) or images (JPEG), those files can be played on supported PCs. They may or may not work on standalone electronic devices such as CD or DVD players, however. If you want to make sure that your music will play on any CD or DVD player, then skip to the next section.

Step 2b: Burn your music CD

Windows 10 has advanced in a number of ways, but it retains some older tools that can still be useful in a pinch. Windows Media Player is essentially a legacy application and hardly the best media player, but it includes a handy CD burner utility that makes it easy to create a music CD that can play just about anywhere.

To get started, go to the Cortana search box and start typing “Windows Media Player.” Once it pops up in the list, click on it. Then, select the Burn tab in the upper right-hand corner.

Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

Next, go to File Explorer and locate the music files that you want to burn to the CD. Drag them over to the burn list. Windows Media Player will tell you how many minutes you’ve used; make sure you’re not exceeding the 80-minute limit. You can hit “Clear list” to start over.

Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

Next, hit “Start burn” to begin the process of burning your music files to the CD. Windows Media Player will provide a progress report as the burn is running. Note that it takes a few minutes to close the session, so be sure to wait until the process is all the way done before ejecting your CD.

Conclusion

That’s all there is to it. You’ve now burned a CD that can be used either as a handy USB flash-drive-like storage media with Windows XP or later machines, or as an easy way to share data or music with any other PC or CD/DVD player users. CD-R media is relatively inexpensive, running around $0.20 cents for a 700MB disc, and can last for years without worrying about degradation. There are newer and higher-capacity storage options available today, but sometimes the tried-and-true comes in handy.

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3D gel stacks can grow enough stem cells to treat brain disease

Programmed stem cells promise to tackle all kinds of illnesses, but there’s one catch: making them. It’s hard to cultivate large numbers of them, and the need to grow them on 2D surfaces isn’t very practical. That’s where researchers might come to the rescue: they’ve developed a method of growing neural stem cells in large volumes, but without chewing up too much valuable real estate. The trick is to use polymer-based gels that allow these juvenile cells to grow in 3D stacks.

The gels help the stem cells remodel their environment and stay in contact with each other, which is key to preserving “stemness” — that is, the ready-to-program state — in the third dimension. The result is a culture that takes up just 16 square inches of space versus the 16 square feet required for a conventional 2D approach. It uses fewer nutrients and less energy, too, and the entire stack is a mere 0.03in tall. A doctor could cultivate large batches of stem cells without having to dedicate significant chunks of a room to the process.

This technique doesn’t apply to other stem cell types, as their stemness is dictated by more by the stiffness of the gels. However, this could be a breakthrough. Now that large neural stem cell quantities are viable, scientists are raising the possibility of repairing spinal cord injuries or curing brain diseases like Parkinson’s. The challenge is injecting these stem cells directly into the body. If that happens, though, seemingly permanent conditions could be entirely treatable.

Source: Stanford, Nature

Blizzard’s Jeremy Feasel on how ‘Battle for Azeroth’ puts war back in ‘Warcraft’

World of Warcraft has existed for 13 years, and the franchise’s story has moved past the rivalry between orcs and humans that drove the original real-time strategy game. In World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth, the MMO’s latest expansion, Blizzard will return to that conflict with a deeper, more focused story that revolves around Azeroth’s never-ending war, and the characters driving it.

We spoke with Blizzard senior game designer Jeremy Feasel at Blizzcon 2017 to find out more about the big ideas behind the next chapter in gaming’s longest running saga.

Digital Trends: The conflict between Horde and Alliance is core to Warcraft’s lore, but from a gameplay perspective, it hasn’t played into World of Warcraft significantly in the last several years. What drove the designers to return to it?

Feasel: In WoW’s current arc, we are currently on another planet fighting gods with a pantheon at our back, with an awesome raid coming in Antorus. I feel like when you’re telling a story, you get up to this point where you have this cataclysmic finale of a particular story arc, which we’ve just hit with Illidan and the Burning Legion, and it’s important at that point to reset things a little bit. [We need to] come back to the core of why we’re heroes, who we’re fighting for, and what this world is.

Way back in the day, when you started your adventure in World of Warcraft, you were saving Princess the Boar for a farmer in Elwynn, and passing love letters between one kid on a farm another. You were helping out an orc farmer by kicking some peons off in Durotar. These are the people that make up the world of Azeroth. These are stories about the people who live there. They make those people important to us. They make it matter when we lose them.

Jeremy Feasel

When we’re way off on other planets fighting gods, I think it’s easy to lose sight of all those awesome characters, and how much they mean to us. It’s really worthwhile to get back to that every once in awhile, and remember that there are people back in Stormwind who would really, really, really care if Sylvanas came in there and had her way with the entire city. It’s our chance to build up those people, to build up their leaders, and build up the awesome political intrigue between Anduin, and Sylvanas, and Thrall, and even Vol’jin (he’s not gone completely! He’s coming back!). Going back to those characters ultimately allows us to tell awesome stories on into the future. They make those things significant and more real.

It’s really worthwhile to get back […] and remember that there are people back in Stormwind.

Also, this is the core story of the World of Warcraft. It’s the core of the Warcraft franchise. It was originally Alliance vs. Horde. It’s not something we’ve significantly touched on since classic WoW. We went there a little bit with Pandaria, but ultimately that was about the Panderan people. We haven’t really had an expansion since Classic, which focused purely on the politics of these two warring armies, and all the people impacted by their choices.

Warfronts, a new type of mission in Battle for Azeroth, pits Alliance versus the Horde, is going to be Player-versus-Enemy (Co-op fighting A.I.), rather than player-versus-player. Can you talk about why you decided to focus on a purely team-based mode, rather than something more competitive?

Feasel: There’s a large portion of our population that enjoys PvP content. There’s a large portion of the population that enjoys PvE content. We don’t necessarily want to conflate the two in every single instance. In “Islands,” in particular, we wanted to do both. We have three different difficulty settings, we have a brand-new group of A.I. that plays much closer to players, rather than regular WoW mobs. They make strategic decisions, they can decide to go offensive or defensive, they can come and gank you if you’re playing against a particularly good A.I., without necessarily needing to play off against players.

Really, the goal here is to characterize the other faction, and that’s not always players. That is often characters, like trolls seeking justice for Vol’jin, and it’s important that we tell their story to build up the Horde and the Alliance. This expansion is one of those opportunities; not necessarily to purely focus on player-versus-player, but to focus on faction-versus-faction, and the members that make up those factions. And making each of those factions, and all of the allied races within them, even the existing ones — even the dwarves and Tauren and the trolls — to rebuild them as three-dimensional characters with their own desires and influences.

We wanted to have that PvP element in Islands … but for Warfronts, we wanted to have both factions in the same area, because building up your based, and choosing your technologies, are so specific to the group that you’re with. In order to have all those decisions be meaningful and interesting, it needed to be something that you could come together with as a group, and then ride out and feel awesome. Often, that’s a very difficult thing to get across in a PvP environment, where both sides need to feel the same level of building up and coming at each other. With a PvE opponent, we can control the difficulty of things being thrown at you and make it always a fun experience.

Do Warfronts position players in specific roles within a conflict?

Feasel: You can do whatever you want when you enter a Warfront. If you want to be the dude that takes territory and you want to do more combat, you can do that. If our playtesting so far, we’ve had people who just chose to go chop wood, because that’s how they wanted to contribute to their particular environment. Honestly, it’s pretty cathartic. You go off, you feel like a peon in Warcraft III, you’re chopping some wood. Your wood bar is going up. Then you go back to the base, you turn in your wood, and you get a big chunk towards building one of those buildngs. You feel like you’ve solidly contributed to the warfront.

You can do whatever you want when you enter a Warfront.

We want to offer a variety of ways you can play in this particular instance, whether you want to be the support guy, or the front-line guy, or even if you want to join the waves of forces that are exiting your base to help them push forward, you can be that guy. You can be the guy that yells to everybody and says, “Hey! We’ve got enough forces now! Now is the time! Everybody join me at the lumber mill [and] we’re gonna go kill this other faction!”

You’ve talked a lot about character development: Is your goal with Battle for Azeroth to build up larger characters?

Feasel: Sure. I think you saw that in Alex [Afrasiabi]’s presentation [on what’s next for World of Warcraft] yesterday. We have five different main characters that we want to follow during the course of the expansion. You’ve seen a little bit of Anduin’s expansion over time, you’ve seen some of Jaina [Proudmoore]’s expansion over time, but really, for the first time ever, we’re able to focus huge story arcs on these characters, to build them forward as characters and tell the next chapters in their stories. It’s an awesome opportunity for us to continue building these characters, and then see where that takes the storyline afterwards now that they’re front and center.

You focused heavily on one character in Legion, now you’re focusing on five. You’re moving a lot of stories forward. Does this signal a paradigm shift in World of Warcraft tells stories?

Feasel: I think it’s a continuation or an evolution of the endgame storytelling we did in Legion, where we took Illidan’s arc all the way through to the end. We thought that was an awesome story, and we felt that was an awesome arc to take throughout the course of the expansion. It told a great story, gave us an awesome finale, and when you see what Illidan’s eventual fate is you’re going to say, “great. That’s cool. That’s an awesome finale for this particular character.” This is the opportunity to apply those same learnings to a lot of our other big characters in World of Warcraft, where we have an expansion pack that makes sense.

Blizzard has not set a release date for ‘World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth’, which is currently in development. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Will my phone adjust to Daylight Saving Time automatically?

Let’s do the timewarp again …

Twice a year the clocks change (for most of us). We “spring forward” and “fall back,” and depending on where we live that happens on a different day. It’s all sort of convoluted. And this inevitably leads to folks wondering what they have to do to their Android phone so things work right after the switch. If this sounds like you, we’ve got good news:

You don’t have to do anything.

This is the best thing you’ll never have to do for your phone!

Unless you’ve went into your phone’s settings and switched away from the automatic network time (in which case you already know what to do), you won’t have to do a thing. Your Android will check the network for the correct date and time and switch itself on it’s own, changing the system time so that things like calendars and alarms will still be right. The same thing applies when other parts of the world move an hour forward or back on their schedule, and still apply in six months when we change again. And more practically, it’s also what lets our phones know the right time when we fly or drive to a different time zone.

If you’re worried about your phone’s ability to switch the time automatically, go double check your “date & time” settings and make sure your time zone is set properly and that you have “automatic date & time” turned on. The network and phone will handle the rest while you sleep.

Apple reminds iPhone X owners they’re using an OLED display

Apple’s bezel-less “X” is the first iPhone with an OLED screen — a technology known for its greater contrast and saturation, but also for its tendency to get burn-in. To make sure customers understand that their $1,000 phone might suffer from image persistence in the future, the tech titan has updated the iPhone X’s display support page to explain how an OLED screen works.

The company explains that the “slight shifts in color and hue” when viewing the screen off-angle (read: not straight on) are perfectly normal. It also says OLEDs exhibit slight visual changes with long-term use, such as showing remnants of a high-contrast image displayed on the screen for extended periods of time even when it’s already showing another image.

Those two are also the most common issues Pixel 2 XL owners have with their Android Oreo devices. By pre-empting potential complaints, Apple is most likely trying to avoid facing a similar debacle. In Google’s case, though, some customers’ complaints might be warranted, since they reportedly got burn-in as soon as a week after their purchase.

Despite the warning, Apple assures customers that their pricey new phones aren’t going to have less-than-perfect displays anytime soon. The company says it “engineered the Super Retina display to be the best in the industry in reducing the effects of OLED “burn-in.” And, as AppleInsider notes, iPhone X uses OLED made by Samsung. The Korean conglomerate also manufactures OLED screens for Pixel 2, which doesn’t suffer from the same issues as its bigger sibling.

Via: Apple Insider

Source: Apple Support

Kaspersky’s antivirus software takes non-threatening files

Kaspersky’s attempt to quash collusion fears through transparency isn’t quite reassuring everyone. In an interview with Reuters, founder Eugene Kaspersky has acknowledged that his company’s antivirus software has copied files that weren’t marked as direct threats. In one example, the program removed GrayFish, a tool meant to corrupt Windows’ startup sequence. Reuters sources also claim that Kaspersky’s software once grabbed the photo of a suspected hacker from their computer, although the CEO didn’t confirm this. He declined to talk about too many specific instances out of concern that it might help hackers cover their tracks.

The revelation doesn’t affect the company’s brief possession of classified NSA files (those were part of a larger file deemed suspicious). However, it’s definitely not normal — antivirus software typically only targets files that are direct risks. And in the case of competing antivirus tools, like F-Secure, it’s not uncommon for them to ask permission before they upload anything.

This doesn’t mean that Kaspersky’s tool is doing anything sinister. According to Kaspersky, it’s really about catching “cyber criminals.” However, the revelation certainly isn’t going to allay concerns that Kaspersky might have helped the Russian government conduct espionage. If the company can take files that don’t have an immediate bearing on a PC’s security, what’s to stop it from passing on files that Russian intelligence might want?

As it is, this also highlights a broader issue with antivirus software as a whole. As Trail of Bits chiefDan Guido explained, many antivirus programs collect a large amount of data about the computers that run them, if often out of necessity. It wouldn’t take much for a less-than-upstanding company or a hacker to misuse that info, and you may want to be sure that you’re comfortable with how an AV suite handles your data before you use it.

Source: Reuters

The emoji creators are battling it out over a ‘Frowning Pile of Poo’

Why it matters to you

Emojis are quickly becoming a universal language, but do we really need more poo?

The Unicode Consortium is a serious bunch of people with a serious job. It’s a non-profit organization dedicated to standardizing software text worldwide. As part of that noble goal, the consortium has the weighty task of approving the addition of new emojis, the silly little single-character cartoons we append to our texts. And now, a feud has broken out between the serious typographers and the more frivolous bloc who oversee emojis. And it’s all over a pile of poo.

Following a submission for the June 2018 class — a proposed emoji titled “Frowning Pile of Poo” — the consortium erupted into a fierce debate over whether such a poo emoji was really necessary and, more broadly, whether the emoji creation process had become too frivolous and commercialized.

As Buzzfeed explains, Michael Everson and Andrew West are two typographers who vociferously objected to the latest submission, saying it cheapened the consortium’s image and was damaging to the Unicode academic reputation.

“The idea that our 5 committees would sanction further cute graphic characters based on this should embarrass absolutely everyone who votes yes on such an excrescence,” they wrote. “Will we have a CRYING PILE OF POO next? PILE OF POO WITH TONGUE STICKING OUT? PILE OF POO WITH QUESTION MARKS FOR EYES? PILE OF POO WITH KARAOKE MIC?”

The answer to all those questions is surely a resounding “Yes!” but let’s move on. An argument could be made that frowning poo is a necessary addition for those times when you want to covey your feelings with poo, only with a more dour and unhappy subtext. Emojis can even be misinterpreted. As the proponents argue in their 12-page proposal, it would “fill in the missing gap in emotions and attitudes that can’t be expressed with the smiling poo emoji alone.”

​The typographers weren’t buying it. “As an ordinary user, I don’t want this kind of crap on my phone,” Everson wrote.

​The obvious culprit is Apple. “It is a pity that Apple followed Softbank rather than KDDI in its reference glyph, since a coil of dog dirt with stink lines and flies is surely the only proper semantic,” the rebuttal memo declared.

There is also fear that the renegade emoji group is running roughshod over normal processes, implementing emojis in less than a year’s time with very little scrutiny or oversight. “Why the rush?” asked West.

In the meantime, Apple has just released its latest round of emojis — more than 70 of them if you update your device to iOS 11.1. As always, anyone you send the new emojis to will need the update as well, or they won’t be able to see them.

Regardless, it doesn’t look like this controversy will be flushed away any time soon. The debate over whether a surly pile of poo will one day find a home on your smartphone rages on.

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