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."
File List
The following files are included with FracPPC v1.1
FracPPC (The application)
Read Me (This file)
FracPPC Version History
FracPPC User Manual
Selected Parameter Files (A folder with example parameter files)
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.
Parameter Files
In my explorations with FracPPC I save any fractals I think are striking or might be worthy of further investigation to a parameter files folder. In previous distributions I included the complete collection of these files, but this has grown to quite a number, and I decided I was not exactly doing a favor to FracPPC users by including an enormous collection that mixed some rather pedestrian images with some really exciting images, in some cases with color maps that I devoted some time to tweaking, with no indication of which are the more worthwhile files.
For this distribution I decided to cull out some files and leave the ones I thought were pretty cool. This still leaves quite a few files. Anyone who wants the complete collection can still get them by downloding:
ftp://members.aol.com/fracppc/parameters.sit.hqx
However, there is nothing special about the files in the complete collection; you can generate images yourself that are more worthwhile than many of them. However, I encourage everyone to take a look at the files included with the distribution, especially the files in the "stalks" folders, because they demostrate the various possibilities afforded by the color mapping options, including the various "Regions" options, in FracPPC.
The ﾒSelected Parameter Filesﾓ folder contains four categories of parameter files. In order to keep track of the rather large number of files I've now accumulated, I use the following naming scheme:
All names have at least six characters of the form:
xxnnnn
The first two letters (xx) mean:
ma ﾑ Mandelbrot fractals
ms ﾑ Mandelbrot with stalks
ju ﾑ Julia fractals
js ﾑ Julia with stalks
followed by four numerals which is just an arbitrary index number.
Some files have alternate colorations of the same fractal. These alternate colorations are signified by using the same six letter name as the original fractal followed by cn where n is a numeral.
Sometimes I include interesting zooms of the same fractal. These are signified by the six letter name followed by zn where n is a numeral.
This convention is occasionally extended, so for example if I have a file called ms1234 and a zoom of that file called ms1234z1, then an alternate coloration of the zoom would be ms1234z1c1.
In the next revision of FracPPC I will probably have a way of storing multiple color map choices in a single parameter file, making it unnecessary to generate multiple files for alternate colorations. Who knows, I may even make it possible to turn a file into a ﾒlibraryﾓ of related zooms and color maps.
Future Versions
The following features are going to appear in future versions, along with better documentation. I list them in the appoximate order of priority.
･ Better color editor
･ Multiple fractal types and display techniques (binary decomposition, etc.)
･ Copying in PICT format
･ Speed-up algorithms (Contour crawling, etc. These don't seem as necessary with the speed the PowerPC can knock fractals out with, but it would still be useful for the large files one might want to generate for printing.
･ Extendibility (so the user can add new fractals)
･ Generation of Quicktime movies showing fractals when zooming in or morphing as a parameter or parameters are changed continuously
･ Anti-aliasing and improved dithering
･ ﾒSpoolingﾓ of large fractal images so that large high-res images can be generated without allocating enormous amounts of RAM to hold dwells
