Aside from adventures in New York and Austin, Nick Black is a lifelong ATLien. He began programming on an ATARI 400 sometime during childhood, and with no one around to tell him better, developed an idiosyncratic, unorthodox style involving more inline assembly and literary allusions than strictly necessary, or perhaps even justifiable. He has since graduated several times from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and dropped out almost as many times. Approaching forty, he still manages to code about ten hours a day, every day, ideally those free of the Daystar’s malignant influence. He hopes to one day destroy the sun. He lives in Midtown Atlanta with a poofy penguin and several orca. Nick exclusively uses black IBM ModelM Trackpoint II M-13 keyboards, and will happily buy any that you might have laying around CLACK CLACK CLACK.
Accepted Talks:
Notcurses: Making terminals do things that were never intended
Notcurses 2 has recently (2020-10) been released, providing for the first time a stable, guaranteed API for this blingful character graphics library. Notcurses, sometimes described as “NCURSES and FFmpeg had a baby”, is a TUI library with unique capabilities for multimedia, including streaming video support, the advanced Quadblitter, palette fades, and plane rotations. It is thus not unreasonable that developers might want to use it for terminal games (assuming that terminal games are a reasonable thing in the first place).
This short talk will cover the shortcomings of the X/Open Curses API and NCURSES (its most common instantiation), effective use of Notcurses and its advanced features, and a brief practicum involving the live coding of a terminal game.
BLING BLING.