This is a history of the publicly released versions of FracPPC.
v1.1 ﾑ Sept. 6, 1996
With this release, I finally decided to start a version history. All entries before this one, therefore, were reconstructed from memory and whatever I can reconstruct from the release notes for each version.
I have a lot of ideas for additional features for FracPPC, but since all versions I have released so far have been "beta" versions, I resolved to refrain from adding any new features until I had fixed all known bugs and cleaned up any parts of the program that were incomplete. As a result, FracPPC is considerably less "flaky."
Things that were fixed:
･ Finally, handling of low memory conditions has been made much more robust. I would appreciate any reports of reproducible crashes in low memory situations. I have cleaned this up quite a bit, but I suspect that memory management is still not perfect...
･ Color Map Editor now works. It sort of worked before, but I cleaned up all the loose ends and partially implemented features. This still isn't what the "real" color map editor will eventually be, this one is too hard to use. However, it does work now.
･ Preferences are now saved. Some startup preferences were added (these would have been meaningless when preferences were not being saved!)
･ Printing is fixed. This stopped working sometime in the two years between v1.0b2 and v1.1b1 ﾑ or maybe it never worked properly. Now it works right for any size fractal and any choice of parameters in the Page Setup dialog.
v1.1b1 ﾑ June 16, 1996
OK, so it's been a while! I didn't spend the entire intervening two years working on FracPPC, obviously! But, some significant new features were added that finally qualify this program as a serious tool for generating fractal images ﾑ admittedly, it still has far to go, but I think this is the minimum essential set of features.
･ Images can be saved to PICT files
･ Areas of image can be selected for zooming
･ Can edit color maps
･ Can apply color maps separately to different regions of fractal
･ User interface has been improved
In a way, the ability to save to PICT files is the most important improvement. Without that, previous versions were more like "toy" programs. Now images can be used as input to graphics programs to manipulate or enhance the image.
The ability to separate fractals into different regions with different color maps is more significant than it may sound. This means that stalks, for example, can be colored separately from the rest of the fractal. Some stunning effects can be achieved with this capability (see the example parameter files). Now that the infrastructure for this capability is laid down, I intend to use it extensively as I add new fractal types to the program, so this will be increasingly useful with future versions.
v1.0b2 ﾑ July 27, 1994
This version fixed a significant bug in version 1.0b1. I had made a mistake in my effort to take full advantage of 16 & 24 bit color displays, and as a result many people saw only a blank window rather than a fractal.
In addition to the bug fix, the ability to generate Julia fractals was added. Also, the Pickover convergence criterion that generates the effect commonly known as "stalks" was added. Also added dithering for 8 bit displays.
v1.0b1 ﾑ May 17, 1994
This is the first publicly released version of FracPPC. It is a very rudimentary program which I wrote because at the time there were no programs available that took advantage of the superb floating point capabilities of the PowerPC to generate fractals.
This version only generated zooms of the Mandelbrot set. Random color maps could be generated. The most significant limitation was that the resulting image could not be copied to the clipboard nor saved as a PICT file. The image could be printed, however. Also, 8, 16, and 24 bit displays were all fully supported (or so I thought...)
