Today I want to introduce you to some UI excerpts. These gorgeous icons have been designed by Anna Shlyapnikova. She’s a very talented graphic artist from Russia and I’m so glad her work will be part of Ascension, this is a great addition. Ascii art consists of fragments pieced together, making a whole. It’s the same with Rubik’s Cube, so the app icon is of symbolic nature. The interface icons might change, Anna is planning some supplements and asked if there is something I possibly need. If you are interested in supporting Anna, please visit her at deviantART or follow her at Twitter.
Explore the stunning art of stargazer Josef Bartoň a.k.a. JoeJesus, one of the most talented space artists of our time. http://joejesus.deviantart.com
A coder’s typeface
Programmers will agree when I say: the font is of high relevance. I’m a big fan of “Menlo”, first shipped with Mac OS X Snow Leopard as the new standard font for Xcode. “Menlo” is a modification of “DejaVu Sans Serif Mono”, a definite improvement in many ways. Today I want to introduce you to a great alternative. Some of you certainly heard of the Droid font family before. It’s the typeface that had been designed for the Android platform. Coders usually prefer monospaced fonts, so it’s no surprise that “Droid Sans Mono” is a suitable coding font. Unfortunately there is one cosmetic issue, it lacks of a distinguishable zero glyph. Matt Freels changed that and created an awesome variant that comes with a dotted zero glyph. It’s called “Droid Sans Mono Custom” and available below.
The development of Ascension is making great progress. While searching for an easy way to achieve advanced hyperlink detection, I discovered the AutoHyperlinks framework. It is part of the Adium project, but (unlike Adium) BSD-licensed. This allows usage even for commercial applications. I created a slightly modified lightweight variant of the framework, which I added to Ascension’s build phase. Cocoa coders should really take a look, the detection capabilities are awesome and implementation is quite easy. Click on the picture to see a non-scaled variant of the screenshot showing the final URL / URI detection scheme of Ascension.
Ascension - ASCII art for Mac OS X
Talking about ASCII art always means talking about computer history. This unique graphic design technique is text based art, consisting of pictures pieced together from the characters defined by the ASCII Standard in 1963. A special form called block ASCII (or high ASCII) uses extended chars of the 8-bit Code page 437, invented by IBM in 1979 for IBM PC and MS-DOS. Block ASCII is often referred as ANSI art. From the widespread usage traced to the bulletin board systems of the late 70’s and early 80’s grew a remarkable scene of devoted underground / online art groups. Over the years, warez groups began to incorporate ASCII art by spreading .nfo files with their releases. At the end of the 90’s the Newskool style emerged and came up with extended characters. Classic 7-bit ASCII chars remain predominant while the style developed further after the introduction and adaption of Unicode. On a modern OS, files containing ASCII art will never look as they were intended by the artist. With a special ASCII/ANSI art viewer even the block ASCII can be displayed properly. Unfortunately, for Mac OS X there is absolutely nothing available worth mentioning… until now. Let me introduce you to Ascension, ASCII art for the rest of us.
The PC has taken us a long way. They were amazing. But it’s changes, vested interests are going to change. And I think we’ve embarked on that change.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs @ D8 Conference
Drop Links with Mac OS X
A known desire: while surfing the web you want to save a specific link for later. I know there are various apps around that support you in this matter but Mac OS X is a very customizable operating system and comes with everything you need. The intension of my tutorial is to show that it’s not necessary to have any application running in the background for said purpose and for a better user experience. Just a few clicks and you’re done.
