AAlib in Flash — June 22, 2009

I am very impressed with Peter Nisch’s work in porting AAlib to Flash. Click on this image if you just like seeing stuff and playing with it:

Peter has an excellent weblog posting about his project, including references, source code, and example images.

AAlib is one of those things that gets shown to me a lot, what with me being the textfiles guy, the site supporting AAlib being in green, and so on. It’s basically a library that will take graphic data and turn it into text, with a very large amount of control over the type of text generated. You can size it, modify things like color, brightness, and contrast, and push the text out in all sorts of ways. It’s used a lot in specific ways, generating text art on the fly being the main one.

It doesn’t stand up to hand-crafted text artwork, of course, but it’s not meant to – it can work quickly, cleanly, with all sorts of incoming data, resulting in raw or finished material you can use any way you want. And as Peter has shown, you can do some amazing stuff with it indeed. I had a great time playing with it, and I think you will too.

Oh, and did I mention that the rest of Peter’s experiments are amazing too? Go click on those bars on the right side of his site.