Ascension roadmap

We know Ascension is already great in displaying ASCII art on the Mac. Let’s talk about some of the key features I’m planning for upcoming Ascension releases.

More fonts

Ascension comes bundled with a special .dfont variant of the Terminus font, optimized for rendering ASCII artwork on a Mac. It’s a modern font, but what about some retro magic? Among other typefaces, the legendary Amiga Topaz font comes in my mind. Modern, retro, who cares. More fonts are coming.

Feature requests by Ryan (@cactusfriend)

Support for .ANS files (colored ASCII). Have a look here to know what this is about. Basically an .ANS file contains regular ASCII art and additional information about 16 foreground and 8 background colors, sometimes even animations. Under DOS, there was a special driver available to properly color and animate this IMHO highest and most beautiful form of text based art. You can imagine this driver is not existing for Mac. Anyway, I think this is a great idea, and I will try to do my best to implement it as complete as possible. Right now I have a feeling the colors won’t be a problem at all, animations probably will be a problem.

This post gets constantly updated. Something’s missing? Please drop a note and share your idea with me.