ASCIIFY
Finds the subject and gives it the whole frame, so logos come out as sharp as photographs
- Swift100%
ASCIIFY turns your photos into art made entirely of keyboard characters, the way every hacker in a 90s movie would have wanted. Pick a photo, drag a slider to decide how many characters wide it gets, choose soft shading or hard-edged two-tone, then paste it into the group chat or save it to Photos as an image. Your cat, rendered in @ and #.
No libraries, just CoreGraphics and a conversion engine of about 460 lines. The photo is decoded with its orientation fixed, then the app hunts for a plain border and crops it away, because a logo floating in white space would otherwise get a third of the grid and turn to mush. A character is roughly twice as tall as it is wide, so the image gets squashed vertically to match, contrast is stretched across the middle 96% of tones, and each cell picks from .:-=+*#%@ by how much ink it needs. Copying was sneakier than expected: chat apps wreck the alignment, so the clipboard gets a code-fenced copy that renders monospaced plus RTF with a pinned font for everything else. The engine never touches UIKit, so the same code also builds a Mac command-line tool for tuning the output without booting a simulator.
- SwiftUI
- CoreGraphics
- ImageIO
- PhotosUI
- XCUITest