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.

I always think it’s a better situation to announce a hiatus happened, instead of that it will be happening. Then everyone’s not worried. So, I had a hiatus from this weblog.

The weblog is, this year, one of the lower priorities of my projects. Between the documentary editing, the sorting and cleaning up of my archives, my massive backup crusade, and a huge realm of other time-takers, I just don’t make this weblog the first thing I want to do when I sit down at my desk or with my laptop.

I have had some awesome trips in the past month, and saw a lot of people who I don’t feel a pressing need to name-drop as proof I hung out with them.  I got some great ideas and have some things I’ll write about here, as I find the time. I just think that doing has to trump talking about doing for the time being.

Anyway, I was gone, now I’m back. Hi there.