Posts tagged Mac OS X

Ascension - along an unknown road

Photo by Jean-Pol Grandmont

Some people asked if I have a roadmap for Ascension. Will it be more like a viewer or an editor? What features are you going to implement? To be honest, I’m not sure. Primarily I aim to create the best ASCII art viewer around. On the other hand Ascension is already capable of editing and resaving all supported ASCII documents using the proper encoding. I have no plan to drop that support, why should I? So let’s say it is not just a viewer. Anyway, at first instance I want to develop viewer components and later releases will very likely add additional editor capabilities. I can imagine an image to ASCII conversion or an implementation for drawing block ASCII (CP437) and modern ASCII (Unicode). First release will be in a few weeks. Of course Ascension will come with a beautiful UI, stunning interface icons and great usability. But these features are expected on Mac OS X, a platform where Ascension even is unrivaled. Ascension is related to ASCII art and I’m curious to find out where this unknown road leads us. 

Photo by Jean-Pol Grandmont

A mod for Itsy, a wonderful Twitter client for Mac OS X. This gorgeous design has been created by katsu3477. I updated it to work with current builds and probably future versions. Just replace the contents from my archive with the files located in Itsy’s resources folder to achieve some UI awesomeness. http://cl.ly/b2bb05e0104e206d065e

A mod for Itsy, a wonderful Twitter client for Mac OS X. This gorgeous design has been created by katsu3477. I updated it to work with current builds and probably future versions. Just replace the contents from my archive with the files located in Itsy’s resources folder to achieve some UI awesomeness.

http://cl.ly/b2bb05e0104e206d065e

In addition to the toolbar images I posted here on my blog some time ago, Anna Shlyapnikova created an awesome set of icons for Ascension, intended to replace the standard preferences set you most likely know from many Mac OS X applications. While Ascension is making great progress (there should be a release within the next few weeks), Anna shares the icons she created for my upcoming app with the whole world. You can download her “Mini Icon Set” from the link below. It’s free even for commercial use as long as you credit and implement a link back to her deviantART page. Get the “Mini Icon Set” by Anna Shlyapnikova

In addition to the toolbar images I posted here on my blog some time ago, Anna Shlyapnikova created an awesome set of icons for Ascension, intended to replace the standard preferences set you most likely know from many Mac OS X applications. While Ascension is making great progress (there should be a release within the next few weeks), Anna shares the icons she created for my upcoming app with the whole world. You can download her “Mini Icon Set” from the link below. It’s free even for commercial use as long as you credit and implement a link back to her deviantART page.

Get the “Mini Icon Set” by Anna Shlyapnikova

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. 


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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.

 

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Parcel Calculator 0.3.0 is out!

Finally I found time to finish & publish Parcel Calculator 0.3.0 for Mac OS X, the native Cocoa application for calculating girth, volumetric weight, and for tracking parcels of many common global players. This release is the most comprehensive to date, so you might wonder what’s new.

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My invitation for Gitti private beta arrived this morning, I’m excited to be one of the first users getting a chance to test this impressive Git client for Mac OS X.

My invitation for Gitti private beta arrived this morning, I’m excited to be one of the first users getting a chance to test this impressive Git client for Mac OS X.