Here’s my breakdown of all the measurable things that I said I’d like to do last year, and what’s happened to those since then.
- 🔜 Fonts: Font development has been going for many months, with some good results in macOS, iOS, Windows and Linux. It’s a big and complicated thing and isn’t done yet. I did release some very early fonts in Mutant Standard 0.4.0, but they didn’t work very well. Future font versions will work much much better.
- ❌ Get close to 100% planned Unicode Standard completion: Nope, not even close (it’s at about 61% compared to Unicode 10.0) and I think that’s a good thing. I want Unicode progress to take a backseat right now to emoji quality and whatever I’m just generally interested in the most.
- ✴️ Lots more gay stuff: Both yes and no. Yes as in Mutant Standard S3, no as in, I didn’t really see any widely used symbols or flags I haven’t encoded already, so there’s nothing really new in the core set. That’s fine.
- ✅ Concrete set of colour modifiers: Was completed in August 2018 with Mutant Standard 0.3.0. There are still some leftover colour ideas that I’m not sure what to do with yet.
- 🔜 Hoof hands: After a bunch of false starts, it’s now fully, actually in progress, and you’ll get at least some of them next version!
- 🌀Sticker Sheets: Really nice prototypes were made, but the fees for owning a PO Box are too costly to make it possible for me to sell them, and I ran the numbers on a possible Kickstarter and decided that it may be possible to run a successful Kickstarter campaign, but I don’t really want the stress of going through with one, especially to be potentially met with failure, so they’re on hold until further notice :/.
- ✅ Start encoding in the PUA: PUA encoding has started since Mutant Standard 0.3.0 in August 2018.
- ✅ Open source orxporter: Was open sourced in October 2018.
- ✅ Provide text descriptions: All emoji have been text described since Mutant Standard 0.4.0 in April 2019.
Year 3
Especially because of resource constraints, I have fewer specific goals for the next year other than keep going as things are, and keep going over existing goals and small projects.
- Finish CBx and sbix font formats. This should ensure compatibility on macOS, iOS, Windows, Android (rooted Android devices only) and Linux.
- Release hoof hands.
- Keep building up Unicode emoji.
- Keep improving the standard of aesthetics of all the emoji, which was started in 0.4.0 (already probably halfway there).
- Reconsider sticker sheets. Also consider re-opening merch in general, but try to do it in a more focused and efficient way.