Fractal Programs

Last Edited – February 12, 2010 by Randall Crock
Filed under: Personal, Programming, Technology

So in the last couple days, I have gone off on a programming binge and spent close to 20 hours working on personal projects. Those projects happen to be ones I have picked at every so often regarding fractals. I first rebuilt some of my console (command line) tools for fractal generation, then decided to provide a full-fledged graphical interface for creating them.

Once that was done, I moved on to a relate project where a user could pan, zoom, and move through different fractals, and save any of the views along the way. A friend and I built one which worked back in high school but it was lost somewhere in between, and so I started from scratch. I took the framework from my console and other graphic applications and turned it into a simple fractal explorer.

All these programs target the new .NET 4 platform (Windows only, sorry) which is still technically in Beta. The reason I targeted .NET 4 was because it adds native support for parallelization. This is really nice for work with fractals since they are processor intensive, and parallelization allows for more thorough use of your processor if you have multiple cores.

I will be making all these applications and their source public, so anyone who wants to can download them, change them, and play with them. Until .NET 4 is officially released, they will lightly supported beta versions, and once .NET 4 launches, I will support them through some kind of other platform.

Until I get the apps up (I am still doing testing to make sure they won’t utterly break) have fun over on my Fractals page!

One Response to “Fractal Programs”

  1. Hi Randall. I’m super senior at wpi and i’ve also been doing some fractal work as you can see. I wanted to talk to you about some mathematical kung fu i’ve been trying to work out. hit me back with an email.
    guy