ByteProject

Ascension 2.0 alpha 1

Sun, 13 May 2012 15:12:00 +0200

The future is now. Ascension 2.0 alpha 1 has been released today.

What we got here is nearly a complete rewrite, with frameworks and massive changes under the hood that took many months to develop. Each Ascension 2 alpha release will be representing a milestone, alpha 1 is adding support for all known types of ANSi art.

Changelog

built for OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion
memory and performance optimization
multi-threaded documents
support for ANSi art
Developer ID signed application
read-only / viewer mode
custom about box design
gorgeous new file type icons
modern search / replace bar

Some notes about alpha 1

This is an alpha build. It’s far from what the final product will be. Neither the UI is finished nor the preferences are completed. There are many additions and many features already implemented that are either missing a preference, a switch or UI element. ANSi art will always be read-only. Also themes are disabled for ANSi art and thus an ASCII art exclusive feature. Keep that in mind before reporting an issue like “disabling viewer mode fails for .ans files”. Talking about issues: feel free to post anything you encounter here. Ascension makes extensive usage of the API’s introduced in Mountain Lion, it won’t work on any previous version of OS X. I wrote about the matter in this post. You can grab a copy from the download’s section in Ascension’s repository. Optionally just hit the link below.

Download Ascension 2.0 alpha 1

Ascension 2.0 alpha | beta

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 22:39:00 +0200

Progress is great if you share it with others, so I’m announcing the Ascension 2.0 public alpha | beta program today.

Nearly on the same day Apple released Mountain Lion developer preview 1, I got first reports of current Ascension 1.2.4 crashing on the newly announced OS. I knew I had a problem, but what to do? It took me some days until I made up my mind. I won’t submit an update to the MAS that fixes support for a beta operating system. Said bug is wiped in the current development build of Ascension anyway. So far so good. What now? My plan is to publish the next Ascension together with Mountain Lion. Ascension 2.0 will in fact require Mountain Lion. The OS X v10.8 API is just great, giving me the opportunity to develop the best Ascension ever, Twitter support is a good example. It’s just a few lines of code for a great experience. Keep in mind that this is a spare time project. If I have the possibility to implement awesome new features with minimum efforts needless to say I’m gonna do it. So if you like to have the most accurate rendering of ANSi and ASCII art ever seen on OS X, Ascension 2.0 will be right here at your fingertips. But Mountain Lion is definitely required, everything else would be just too time-consuming for me. I hope everybody understands my point of view.

Anyway. All you people test-driving Mountain Lion already won’t have to wait until it’s official release for a new version of Ascension. As I already mentioned above: the Ascension 2.0 alpha | beta program will be public, with the first build arriving soon. Stay tuned. Welcome to the brave new world!

We finally managed to finish a project we’ve been busy...

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 14:01:20 +0100

We finally managed to finish a project we’ve been busy working on during the last weeks. It is so great as stand-alone *NIX command line utility and it will also be an important part of my upcoming AnsiLove.framework release 2.0. Feel free to try, investigate, fork, improve, whatever. We released it under a MIT-style license. Like it’s PHP ancestor, AnsiLove/C will convert ANSi and artscene related file formats into beautiful PNG images. But this time, our goals were evolution, portability, performance and the most accurate rendering of all known ANSi art file types to date. Needless to say we achieved them all. At this point I’d like to thank my friends Frederic Cambus and Brian Cassidy for their ongoing support. Without you, AnsiLove/C would never have been possible. This project grew so fast because we loved what we did. Pour la legende!

AnsiLove/C - ANSi / ASCII art to PNG converter in C

The Illusion of Progress

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 00:49:00 +0100

Take my hand and let us dive into the wonderful world of my current projects. Take a brief glimpse on the wonders at your feet.

First of all, why is this post called the illusion of progress? For understanding it, you need to know what I did in the past weeks. Nothing. I did nothing. Already scratching your head? Ok, let me explain.

Sometimes when you’re involved in many projects you may feel like you’re going round in circles. You keep moving without reaching your destination. In short: I needed a break. So I took some time off. I enjoyed living together with my beloved wife and the cats, watched some shows and movies on TV, jammed a lot on my guitars and played World of Warcraft. The usual stuff non-geeks do. Neither did I plan to have coding holidays nor did I initially knew how badly I needed them. I’m even tempted to say it all happened subconsciously. I did not count the days so I’m not sure when I stopped. Must be more than three weeks now. I even did not think much about it. You know, time just flies. Today, I wrote the first lines code since then. Again, I did not plan any of this, it just happened. I won’t say I’m something like recharged, I don’t know. But most notably it feels right again and that is what really matters.

The code I did today was for AnsiLove/C, a port of AnsiLove/PHP to the C programming language. Most of you may have noticed that Ascension 2 still has not been released. For good reason. I created a framework for rendering ANSi art, which was the major feature I had on my roadmap for Ascension’s 2.0 incarnation. The framework uses AnsiLove/PHP to render ANSi art, invoking PHP CLI which is installed by default on Lion. AnsiLove.framework works out of the box, so everything was fine. Then came App Sandboxing. Guess what? It’s not my framework getting sandboxd denies, it’s PHP CLI itself. It seems some tasks are just not intended to happen in sandboxed apps. I know I can use temporary entitlements (which I’m actually doing in the current development build), but that’s no solution I feel comfortable with. In the end I had to realize it’s not a good choice to bundle loads of PHP scripts into a native Cocoa app. Knowing there’s nothing like AnsiLove available neither in Cocoa nor in C, what would you do? Giving up? Not an option. There is just one way: I have to port the whole friggin’ thing by myself. That’s what I’m doing right now. But why to the C programming language? Most people might have ported it directly to Cocoa. Well, let’s say it’s a noble gesture. I just had to do it in C. This is for the ANSI scene and all those ANSI art lovers out there. Someone else, running Linux, BSD or whatever, will be glad somebody choose to develop it in C so it can be used for tasks or embedded in applications on those operating systems. AnsiLove/C is not intended to run on the Mac only, it should run on all common OS, even on friggin’ Haiku. I mean I already have my framework which will run perfectly as a Cocoa layer on top of AnsiLove, wouldn’t it be egoistic to develop the whole thing in Cocoa?

So this is what’s happening in the future: I finish AnsiLove/C, then I’m gonna update my AnsiLove.framework to use AnsiLove/C and finally I’m able to finish what will be Ascension 2 one day. Excited? I am. Again.

BadPlastic for Mac

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 21:51:51 +0100

Today my friend Gleb Dolgich (@glebd) released his brand new app BadPlastic on the Mac App Store. It’s the perfect tool for tracking your credit card debt and comes with a sexy UI, definitely worth checking out. The about box Gleb is using in here is the one I designed for Ascension 2 (SVEpicAboutBox).

BadPlastic on the Mac App Store

AnsiLove.framework

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 20:16:00 +0200

Today I want to introduce you to what I’ve been coding recently. Here is a Cocoa framework for rendering ANSi art, and it’s called the AnsiLove.framework. It uses a modified version of Frederic Cambus’ awesome AnsiLove as library, creating PNG images from ANSi source files.

But why? As you may know, I’m busy developing Syntoxic right now but I’m also working on Ascension 2. Yes, that’s right. Ascension 2 is coming. A fact you probably haven’t known yet. One of the major features I planned for version 2 is rendering ANSi art. There will be a bunch of other great improvements, but this is the most remarkable. While searching the internet for some hints how to interpret ANSi escape sequences, I stumbled upon AnsiLove. Wouldn’t it be nice to use that as library and create a Cocoa layer on top of it? I needed to modify AnsiLove as well, but basically that’s what I did and it works just fine. Please note that it took me just a few days to create this framework, while Frederic Cambus spent years of coding and testing AnsiLove. He deserves all the honor for it, not me. The sources are up on GitHub, including a very detailed documentation. Drop a note if you like it, and stay tuned for some great things to come!

AnsiLove.framework repository on GitHub

Farewell, Dennis Ritchie

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 00:56:00 +0200

He was father of the C programming language and without him there would be no UNIX. His pioneering work paved the way for many modern programming / scripting languages like Objective-C, C#, Perl, Java, Go, JavaScript and PHP. Entire operating systems are written in C or build upon the UNIX legacy, most notably BSD and hence Mac OS X. Farewell, Dennis Ritchie… may you rest in peace.

"Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma -..."

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 10:30:00 +0200

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

- Steve Jobs (1955 - 2011)

First Syntoxic details

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 22:40:52 +0200

Time to to talk about some key features I have in mind for Syntoxic.

Please note the screenshot above is early work in progress, it’s not the final UI. I also have more features on my roadmap I’m keeping secret at the moment. The more Syntoxic gets usable the more I’ll report on it. Okay, here we go:

syntax highlighting / syntax coloring for many languages
auto-completion
grammars (bnf-style or .plist, maybe both)
themes
extensible with Plug-Ins (API)
Syntoxic Plug-In / Command Creator
execute scripts with your favorite interpreter
scriptable with JSTalk
Syntoxic terminal utility (already 100% done)
powerful text editing and RegEx tools
work in the Cloud, with gists and pasties
Textmate-bundle support

What Syntoxic will not be? Syntoxic won’t be a Lemming. It’s a trend of upcoming editors to look and behave like Textmate. I prefer doing my own innovations but of course Syntoxic will come with many features, making it competitive to Textmate, at least that’s the goal. I hopefully get all those things done, but I’m pretty confident ;)

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE INANIMATE OBJECT?

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 16:13:00 +0200

My guitars: an Epiphone Annihilation-D (Jeff Waters signature flying-V model) and a Cort X11.

Private Properties in Objective-C

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 09:46:00 +0200

Private Properties in Objective-C:

I’m an avid fan of properties and I’m using them as often as possible. Recently someone asked me how I deal with private variables. The answer is: a private property. Initially I wanted to write my own blog post about it, fortunately David Linsin already did this. His approach is very similar to mine so I just share the link with you.

Announcing Syntoxic

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 22:45:00 +0200

A syntax highlighting text editor for Mac OS X. Beautiful. Contemporary. All you ever needed. Product availability? When it’s done.

Ascension roadmap

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 01:42:00 +0100

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.

Yozora color theme for Xcode4 Yozora is a custom .dvtcolortheme...

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 01:35:00 +0100

Yozora color theme for Xcode4

Yozora is a custom .dvtcolortheme I created for Xcode4. Yozora is the Japanese word for night sky. This theme is based upon the popular Monokai theme for Textmate. Nearly all colors have been changed for Yozora, some just slightly and some more. You need Xcode4 GM (or any newer version) to use my theme. Please drop a note if you like it.

Download Yozora

Boxer plays MS-DOS games on your Mac. That’s what...

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 00:12:00 +0100

Boxer plays MS-DOS games on your Mac. That’s what it’s all about. It’s based on DOSBox, comes with a gorgeous interface, countless features and a Delicious Library like shelf for your classic goodies. I know the year has just started, but I’m a dedicated retro geek who loves to take the way back to the age of pixels, back to all those great games I know from my youth. It’s very likely that this will be my personal highlight 2011.

Boxer - DOS game emulator for Mac

BWToolKit 1.2.5 w/o private API

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 21:01:00 +0100

I recently forked BWToolKit to make it conform with the Mac App Store guidelines. The current version comes with an element called BWTokenField, which uses NSTokenAttachmentCell and this is private API. In other words: using BWToolKit in your App will result in MAS rejections. Since I decided to use BWToolKit in Ascension (a great enrichment), I created a variant without private API.

BWToolKit is one of the best known Cocoa frameworks / IBPlugins, for good reason. It contains commonly used UI elements and other objects designed to simplify your Mac development process. In short: create stunning interfaces on the fly. The image above explains very much of what BWToolKit is capable. You may want to have a look at the BWToolKit website for further details. The framework has been created and is maintained by @brandonwalkin, drop him a note and say “thank you” for his awesome creation. If you take a close look at the image above and compare it with the one on the website you will notice something is missing. It’s the BWTokenField mentioned above. I took all BWTokenField related classes and resources from the project and the Interface Builder plugin. I recompiled it and it works like a charm. According to the reports seen here it’s save to use with said modification. So if you love the Mac App Store and you love BWToolKit, this is your solution: a MAS save variant. You can download the compiled framework from here, IBPlugin is included, too.

BWToolKit 1.2.5 without private API

Grab the sources of this fork

AutoHyperlinks Framework R2

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 22:14:00 +0100

AutoHyperlinks Framework R2:

AutoHyperlinks is a Cocoa framework for hyperlink detection. I forked it once to bundle an optimized variant with Ascension. I recently published Release 2 of my fork, with just minor modifications under the hood. The project compiles now as Intel 32/64 binary to not conflict with the Mac App Store guidelines.

Why Apps now?

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 21:55:00 +0100

Why Apps now?:

Apps are the merger of popular culture and computing. Great post by @Lessien, worth reading.

Ascension 1.0.3

Sun, 26 Dec 2010 16:47:00 +0100

Ascension 1.0.3 has been released today. You could describe this as a bugfix release, nearly no new features were added. The current build is not beta anymore, I wiped the last issues I encountered and Ascension should run smooth and stable. I’m also working on version 1.1.0 with some significant changes under the hood, most of them affecting the way it handles different encodings and file types. It’s all about usability. Details about it at a later date. Ascension 1.1.0 will be submitted to the Mac App Store. For now, let’s have a look what has changed in 1.0.3 so far - if you want to learn more about Ascension, please visit the project page.

Changelog:

Eliminated a bug that applied wrong theme colors on encoding changes
Menu item “Save as…” is now “Export…” to match the toolbar entry
Subclassed NSTextView to be more flexible for future implementations
Wiped a bug that occured when themes were reordered
Immediate linkification of pasted hyperlinks

Download: Ascension 1.0.3 (Mac OS X 10.6+)

"Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window."

Sat, 11 Dec 2010 22:24:52 +0100

“Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window.”

- Steve Wozniak