JM's Mandelbrot Explorer is a small easy-to-use program for exploring the wonders of fractals. You don't need to understand the mathematics behind this wonderful area to enjoy its beauty. Just point and click with your mouse to discover patters never seen before.
Contact me at the address on my About page with comments.
A long, long time ago, around June 1998, I spent a weekend mucking around with the equation z:=square(z)+c, the equation of the Mandelbrot Set. I was amazed when this familiar pattern appeared on my screen from the program that I had typed in. Of course, I then wanted to explore it, so I had to add some method of navigation. This started out as being usable, but very unfriendly. After adding colours based on iterations, my program started to look interesting.
At this point I started looking around at other freeware and shareware fractal programs on the net. Most were pretty bad, being really slow and with appalling interfaces. I downloaded every program I found, and soon had a good idea of the most useful features.
Now that I had a list of things to do, I quickly created versions 0.1 to 0.99 (a revision list is below). Version 0.99, the first publically available, was quite user-friendly, but a bit slow compared to the speediest programs available. Luckily I must have had some sort of inspirational episode soon after, and Version 1 turned out 10 times faster and with a zillion more features.
Now my little program was faster than (almost) anything available, and certainly easier to use. Up until version 1.03a only gradual changes were made. Then a friend said, in passing, that it would be nice if he could enter fractal equations himself. I agreed that it would be nice, but I had absolutely no idea how to implement it.
Time passed, and I moved onto other projects. As fate would have it, one of these other projects led directly into an implementation of the solving of simple user-defined equations. With this as the basis, I started work on putting this into the Mandelbrot Explorer. Egads! This "simple" new feature doubled the length of the code, and tripled the overall complexity. I could now see why so few other fractal programs implement it.
Anyway, with it added and debugged I decided it was time to have a break. Oh, you're still reading this...well, I'm still on my break doing other projects. One never knows when the inspiration will hit me to do some more work on JM's Mandelbrot Explorer. By the way, if there is another release, the name of the program will probably change to something shorter and snappier.
James (28-3-1999)
A few months later...
I found out how to do fast colour-cycling, and also found it increased the speed of the rest of the program. Unfortunately, I also saw the need for a good palette editor, and that took quite some time to perfect. In my time off from this project I learnt some better programming techniques, so I was motivated to tidy up a lot of the fractal code. All in all, this small functional addition turned into quite an overhaul.
James (16-5-1999)
Visit the JM Enterprises homepage for information about other freeware offerings.
8-Mar-2005 Check out FractalPeaks, a 3D evolution of JM's Mandelbrot Explorer.
23-Nov-2003 Fixed up the links to other fractal sites. Not a lot of action on Xaos for a while, which is a shame.
20-Jan-2002 This project is dormant, but not extinct. There will be no new releases for the foreseeable future.
27-May-1999 v1.21 released. Bugfixes and tweaks (more...).
version 1.21 (202kB).
See what's new in the revisions list.
Learn how fractals work, and have fun exploring the most famous fractal of them all - the Mandelbrot Set.
Rated 6 out of 6 at NoNags
Rated 4 out of 5 at ZDNet
There are plenty of sites which have lists of dozens of fractal related sites. Here are just the places that I have found most useful or inspirational.
Xaos - Real-time fractal zoomer - Amazingly fast freeware fractal software. Officially released for many platforms, but currently only available as a pre-release for Windows. If you are using Windows you may be able to get the DOS version working. This software has loads of features, including a startling autozoom, where you can sit back and watch as the computer chooses an interesting path. Unfortunately, it's not very user-friendly, and you can't specify your own fractals (unlike a certain other program that I could mention...).
Fractal eXtreme - Very professional shareware fractal program. Again, no user-defined fractals, though the software is fast and well-designed. Being shareware, you have to pay if you want to use it for more than 15 days.
Mu-Ency - The Encyclopedia of the Mandelbrot Set - Truly comprehensive collection of information about the Mandelbrot Set, and how to calculate it. Contains all the technical information that other sites skip over.
Third Apex to Fractovia - An astoundingly large gathering of free fractal software. Indeed, the whole site is a lovingly crafted selection of all things fractal, from biographical notes about Benoît Mandelbrot to galleries of fractal images.
It's freeware! It may be used and distributed freely.