ASCII Art Generator Ajaxified

ASCII art is an art form that relies on ASCII characters to create images, logos and so on. It was made popular during the uprising of the Warez movement in the early computing history days in addition to that it was commonly used on the USENET for signatures.





I read a couple of days ago about an ASCII art generator created in Flash at Ajaxian and felt compelled to demonstrate that there's no reason to use non-standardized technologies to create something like this. So I sought out to find some .Net libraries I could rely on to convert images to ASCII art and I found Sau Fan Lee's ASCII art generator which was just what I needed. I ported it to Gaia to add up some "Ajax Flavor" and here's the results.

I think that today there are not many excuses for using non-standardized technologies, and I want to show that mostly anything that you can do in "non-standard technologies" can also be achieved with good old standards like HTML, JavaScript and CSS. And with the advent of the HTML 5 standard we're soon also able to render videos using nothing else but standard technology. The "Gaia ASCII Art Generator" isn't 100% stable, it will choke on some images, but this is more a problem with the ASCII art generator library Sau Fan Lee developed than a problem with Gaia. Though I still think it does quite a good job at prooving my point about standards ;)

Have fun, I did!

Oh yeah, here is the Ajax ASCII Art Generator, and it's Open Source too and all code is available if you like to play with it yourself :)

PS!
I haven't tested it on Mono, but since Gaia is 100% Mono compatible I think it should be pretty easy to have it running on Mono. If you make the changes needed to have it running on Mono and would like to share those with me I'd be more than willing to update the code download :)

PPS!
All the code is available (of course) and Open Source (GPL)

PPPS!
Gaia Programming contest goes to an end soon for those participating. Remember that you need to send your submissions in before the 1st of April.

Tags: gaia contest standards