This is a history of the publicly released versions of Fractal Domains.
v1.2.2 — Jan. 20, 1998
Mostly a bug fix release. Normally I would have delayed this release until there were more substantial enhancements, but the last generally distributed version, 1.2, has a serious bug (the "Save As PICT..." bug) and needs to be replaced now.
There is one major new feature — the ability to save an image as a PNG file. PNG is a relatively new standard graphics format that uses a lossless compression algorithm to store 24-bit color images.
Although the "Render Image..." option permits the creation of very large image files, restrictions in the PICT format prevents these images from being stored as PICT files. PNG does not suffer from this restriction.
There was one _really_ major bug that slipped through with v1.2 -- the "Save As PICT..." command did not work with a fractal window, it simply did nothing! It only worked with an image created with the "Render Image..." command, but this could only be used by registered users. This has been fixed. "Save As PICT..." now will save fractal images directly from the fractal window. For unregistered users, this will work with fractals using the "Escape Time" dwell method and either no orbit trap or the cross orbit trap. For registered users, it will work for all fractals.
Behavior in low memory conditions has been improved. In particular, some operations would fail "silently" when there was insufficient memory — now an alert box will come up in these circumstances.
v1.2.2b1 — Dec 18, 1997
A beta release — I revert to the prudent principle of releasing significantly changed code as a beta before the general release. At this point I realized saving very large files to PICT was futile, so I added support for the PNG format, which I had intended to do anyway. Also fixed the "Save as PICT..." bug. See description of v1.2.2 for details.
v1.2.1 — Dec 7, 1997
This release was an attempt to fix the problem with saving large image files to PICT format. At this point I wasn't aware of the restrictions that exist in creating PICT files. Naturally, the attempt was unsuccessful. This release also had other problems, (for instance, the "Save as PICT..." problem, described above, was still present). It was quickly pulled off the web site and replaced with v1.2.2b1
v1.2 — Nov. 1, 1997
This is the first shareware version. Several significant features were added since the last release. Also, the user interface was improved. For instance, some dialog boxes were combined into "tabbed" dialog boxes, and parameter values can be changed and tried out by using the "Apply" button, obviating the need to repeatedly open dialog boxes.
Major new features include:
New Options for generating dwell values (continuous potential, angular decomposition, distance estimation).
More orbit trap fractals; in addition to stalk-type fractals, you can now use: imaginary or real stalks, circular or square orbit traps).
New features for quality image generation:i mage rendering with anti-aliasing, and spooling large images to disk (allows the generation of images too large to fit into available RAM).
Before v1.2, the program was called FracPPC, and was freeware. FracPPC v1.1 is still available.
v1.1 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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...)
