ByteProject

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. 

My mission is simple. I don’t want to write another application for viewing ASCII art, I’d rather like to write the best application for viewing ASCII art. For the Mac I think I already reached this goal. Even in this early stage of development the rendering of block ASCII / high ASCII is gorgeous and fully implemented. I use some Core Foundation magic to import and display string encodings not directly supported by NSString. 

Don’t mind the kind of fuzzy screenshots, they’ll get automatically scaled for this website. The rendering is crystal clear, you may want to have a look here to see the above picture without any scaling. In this early state the interface may be a subject to change. Ascension is a native Mac OS X application, developed in Cocoa. Im planning to release the code to GitHub soon, this should answer your question if Ascension is going to be open source. For now the following file formats: .nfo, .diz, .asc, .ans and .txt are supported, everything that can contain ASCII/ANSI art. Besides writing the best viewer available, I have some interesting features on my roadmap, but I’m not sure what will make the cut and what probably will not. For example, I could imagine to add capabilities for painting ASCII/ANSI art. Another interesting aspect would be support for colored and animated ANSI, not widespread but existing. We’ll see about that in the future. If you want to dive deeper into the development cycle you may want to follow me on Twitter. I’m known for letting others take part on my coding experiences. Right now I’m not sure when will be the first public release, let’s just confirm it as soon.

Update: Ascension is released, visit the project page.