ANN: asciimatics v1.7.0

[Peter Brittain]

I am very pleased to announce asciimatics v1.7.0!  This is a major update
since the last announced version of the package.



## What is asciimatics?


Asciimatics is a package to help people create full-screen text UIs (from
interactive forms to complex text animations) on Linux, Windows and OSX. It
supports python 2 & 3 and is licensed under the Apache Software Foundation
License 2.0.



## What’s new?


This release includes a `widgets` sub-package to create text User
Interfaces, complete with the standard basic set of widgets you would
expect for creating forms – e.g. text boxes, check boxes, buttons, etc.


Despite its name, asciimatics now fully supports Unicode in utf-8
environments, allowing for non-ASCII input from the keyboard and output to
the screen.  This is extended to the widgets, so you can use them for
languages other than English.


A new Plasma renderer was added, continuing the theme of retro special
effects.  This one can be used to create lava-lamp style animated
backgrounds.  See the new plasma.py sample for an example of how to use it.


A `highlight()` method was added to the Screen to allow you to colour wash
parts of the screen as if you were using a highlighter pen.  This can be
used to highlight or lowlight parts of the screen.  For an example, have a
look at the shadows on a Frame in the forms.py sample.


A complete suite of unit tests and CI builds have been created, to ensure
that the code continues to run across all supported environments.  Latest
results are always available at the project home page.


Various other minor enhancements and fixes have gone in.  For a complete
list have a look at the change log:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/peterbrittain/asciimatics/
master/CHANGES.rst




## Where can I find out more?


https://github.com/peterbrittain/asciimatics