Posts tagged viewer

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. 

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Ascension 1.0.3

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. 

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Ascension 1.0.1 beta 2 is released

I managed to do things even better and released Ascension 1.0.1 beta 2 today. You won’t recognize it at a first glance, but a lot has changed under the hood, thanks to your reports and overwhelming feedback. I’m quite sure the goal of creating the best ASCII art / NFO viewer (and editor) for Mac OS X is already reached. Unfortunately I did neither find time yet to create a project page nor to publish a gallery, but a recent screenshot can be found here. A project page will be available soon.

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Ascension 1.0.0 beta1 is out!

My ASCII Art viewer and editor for Mac has finally been released. For now Ascension supports NFO, DIZ and TXT files. Of course it can handle Unicode documents. Follow the link to browse the repository and get the beta. I will update my project site here as soon as possible. Let me know if anything is not working as expected.

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.

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