I've been working on a rather strange curses-like library called TinyCurses. Today, I released the first source code version. Since it's the first version, it isn't very tested and is likely to be a bit buggy. Also, alpha blending is not operational yet, but will be in a future version. You can find out more information about TinyCurses on it's website, here:
http://code.google.com/p/tinycurses/TinyCurses is notable for it's support of Unicode and 32-Bit RGB color. It uses SDL and SDL_ttf.
Here's a screenshot: