Found some UI mockups for a little utility project from 1996. In the spirit of my juvenile obsession with UI fiddling, I suspect I must have spent a lot of time designing and re-designing stuff and less time actually programming something useful.
Apparently this was supposed to be a tool to colorize ASCII logos to produce ANSI logos for BBSes and text-based title screens to be displayed in the console. Hence the name “ACE”, as in “Ansi Colorizer and Editor”.
But, much to my surprise, I did implement something useful, and I also found the source code of the project, about 1,700 lines of Blitz BASIC 2 code.
After some setup in the shell…
…I was able to compile and run the program. It’s not very polished, and some functions are missing, but it does the (simple) job:
Thinking up different UI designs probably still took of most of my time, as documented by earlier prototypes and an updated version – all of which look completely different, of course. The code wasn’t redesigned half as much. :)
