Posts tagged art

Recent screenshot of my upcoming Mac OS X project Ascension. Some words about it’s progress: all colors of the ASCII content view are customizable now, including the hyperlink colors. Ascension will come with different themes and some cool retro styles known from the 8-bit era. What you see above will probably be the standard theme. We got a new toolbar and I prepared a variety of user preferences. I still have no release date for you guys, anyway most features I had on my version 1.0 roadmap are already implemented. Exercise patience young Padawan, we’re closer than ever before.

Recent screenshot of my upcoming Mac OS X project Ascension. Some words about it’s progress: all colors of the ASCII content view are customizable now, including the hyperlink colors. Ascension will come with different themes and some cool retro styles known from the 8-bit era. What you see above will probably be the standard theme. We got a new toolbar and I prepared a variety of user preferences. I still have no release date for you guys, anyway most features I had on my version 1.0 roadmap are already implemented. Exercise patience young Padawan, we’re closer than ever before.

[Flash 10 is required to watch video]

Screencast of Ascension performing live font color changes. Ascension is my upcoming ASCII art editor for Mac OS X, supporting .nfo, .diz, .asc and .txt files. Quite satisfied with the coding progress, we’re not far from release my friends. A high quality variant (1680x1050) is availabe here.

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

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

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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