Fractile: A Fast Fractal Zoomer

No more ads, Fractile Plus a free app now

georgklein — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 06:22:11 +0000

There used to be two version of this app – Fractile which was ad-supported, and Fractile Plus which was for sale. No more: The ad-supported version has been retired, and Fractile Plus is now available for free. Enjoy! I’d also like to extend my thanks to all the folks who have supported the app so far.

App updates: It seems the main feature requests right now are a bookmark / sharing system, and color cycling. The bookmarks will require some thought to get a nice implementation and may require some form of cloud-based storage / voting scenario. Color cycling is largely a UI issue (I’d prefer not to clutter up the interface with more buttons.) Also the app currently only uses a single worker thread to compute the fractals, it should be simple to spawn an extra one to gain an 80+% speed-up on the iPad 2.

Fractile v2.2 in the app store

georgklein — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 05:10:13 +0000

This includes a color picker to select from 15 color palettes; also textures are dithered to reduce the 16bpp banding.

Color picker coming soon

georgklein — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 04:26:02 +0000

Here’s a quick peek at the upcoming color picker – will be submitted to Apple as part of the v2.2 update later this week.

Update: Spoke too soon – this is delayed as I’m waiting for permission to use some more nice palettes I found online.

Call for color schemes

georgklein — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 20:55:21 +0000

Next version will let you change the color palette, although probably from a fixed list of entries rather than having some palette editor. If you have a color scheme you’re particularly fond of, please post screenshots / pics and I’ll try to include it.

v2 submitted to App Store

georgklein — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 09:22:34 +0000

Updates to both Fractile and Fractile Plus got submitted to Apple today. v2.0 includes the Julia set viewer with live preview, and the free version gets image saving too. Expect to see these in the app store in 10 days.

Update Dec 2: v2 now available from the app store.

v2.0 coming soon

georgklein — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 09:26:12 +0000

Julia set from -0.039+0.695j

The Julia set implementation is progressing well – it’ll probably be pushed to the app store in about a week or so, pending final tweaking of the UI and squishing of a few bugs.

Fractile Plus 1.2 submitted to app store

georgklein — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 07:19:59 +0000

This will be the first paid-for, no-ad release. Features as described below: no Julia set yet, but high-res screenshots. If past performance is anything to go by it should appear end of the week or early next week.

Edit: Now in the app store!

Upcoming features

georgklein — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 06:30:31 +0000

Thanks for the votes on the sidebar – a Julia set function will be implemented as soon as I can work out a decent user interface. Meanwhile, the most-emailed requests were to provide an ad-free version and to allow the saving of screenshots. Screenshots are finished, and this function will be included in an ad-free version (paid) very soon!

Screenshot produced by Fractile on an iPod Touch 4 in about 15 seconds. Resolution is 3301x2201.

Resolution can be selected from several options, which depend on the current view zoom level. The arbitrarily-set maximum is 13 megapixels, i.e. just over 4000×3000 on the iPad – this takes some time, and is large enough that it can crash the photo viewer app on iOS 3.2!

On iOS4.1 and up, screenshots include the location of the image in the EXIF tag, and are directly encoded with libjpeg. On older versions of iOS the saving mechanism is less good – no tags, and UIKit forces a huge RAM allocation which can kill the app.

Tips for new users

georgklein — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 02:44:11 +0000

1. Go ahead and set max iterations to 4096. A lot of the good stuff is not there at the default of 256, and I’ll probably just make 4096 the default in future releases. If you find it slow: just navigate to a less-complex region.

2. Screenshots – for now just press the home and power buttons to use the device’s built-in screenshot function.

3. Ads – I’ll probably provide a method to disable these via in-app purchase in future. If they really annoy you just turn off the network, and no ads will load.

RIP Benoit Mandelbrot

georgklein — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 05:00:27 +0000

BBC News: ‘Fractal’ mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot dies aged 85.