How awesome does an ASCII art app have to be to command a $50 price tag?

boing
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Non-mobile, desktop software is ā€œappsā€ now?

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Prices should always be set at random.

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Itā€™s like unleaded gasoline ā€“ you pay extra to have the lead taken out.

 

yes I KNOW it is because lead was used as an anti-knock compound and unleaded is more expensive because a more expensive anti-knock compound is being used

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This again?

It always was. The term ā€˜killer appā€™ was in use long before it had anything to do with mobile apps. See http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/103376?redirectedFrom=killer+app#eid40167745 for multiple forms of proof.

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ASCII Apps?

       ,     ,                                    ,,,,,,,,,,,
  ;';' ''''' ;,;        ------;;;;------       ,'' ;  ;  ;  ''|||\///
 ,'  ________  ',      |______|;;|______|      ',,_;__;__;__;,'''/\\\
 ;,;'        ';,'        |    |;;|    |         |            |
   '.________.'           '.__|;;|__.'           '.________.'

      Mirugai                Tamago                   Ebi
   (Giant Clam)            (Cooked Egg)             (Shrimp)
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Sure. The context does make the headline confusing, since $50 sounds expensive for a phone art app but is a fairly low price tag to ā€œcommandā€ for most graphic-artist-oriented software in Mac OS. Manga Studio is $210 and Corel Painter is $400, for instance.

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The really funny caveat? Emacs is built into OSX and it has ā€œartist-modeā€ which appears to have remarkably similar functionality. Also Emacs is DRM free and free free and open source.

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The context is that itā€™s $50 for an ASCII art app.

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It is OSX

Typhon:~ jeremy$ ls /Applications
Adobe
Adobe DNG Converter.app
Adobe Digital Editions 3.0.app
Adobe Reader 9
Adobe Reader.app
AirKeyboard.app
AirServer.app
Aperture.app
App Store.app
ā€¦

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because people who use macs like to pay lots of money for everything. the end.

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Oblig Sticky Comics strip:

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ASCII is a medium that some folks need to deliver in, and doing it by-hand in a text-editor is not efficient. As someone who adds diagrams to code and wikis this sounds like a great time saver. I havenā€™t looked at the competition, but $50 hardly seems steep for niche software.

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How is doing it by hand with a text editor not efficient? I create ASCII art that way.

This program is one of the few which doesnā€™t seem to just copy and paste a converted image. But, itā€™s Japanese fonts so not standard ASCII. Iā€™ve yet to find software which does a good job at designing ASCII art versus copying something.

Martin had one which was good (I canā€™t remember the name right now) but seemed over complicated when I could just do it myself in a text editor. Likely this one will be the same. But, it looks interesting. For people who donā€™t want to do it themselves this may be a good option to create something of their own.

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Apps is a shortform for applications. So, apps have been around far longer than mobile.

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This looks like a job for StackExchange!

They suggest using vim, asciio emacs and others,

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For me the biggest issue by far is that text editors are made for editing a 1D sequence of characters, but I like to edit diagrams as if they are 2D visualizations. Operations like moving a block in a diagram, drawing connectors, resizing borders, etc. I find this tedious in pure text editors. This tools seems to address that problem by treating the diagram as a diagram that happens to get rendered as a sequence of characters, not a sequence of characters that happens to be a diagram.

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