SeebsFrac: A fractal program, made by seebs
I am, without a doubt, the most creative program-namer EVER.
There's currently not much for support information, because in my youthful optimism, I can't see that much is needed. Hah. You will, of course, correct me by writing to me with questions, so I can post them in the FAQ, then tell you they're in the FAQ and make fun of you for not reading it.
FAQ
What's going on here?
This is an iterative fractal program. You know that thing with the snowflake, where you start with just a triangle and then suddenly bam, snowflake? That kind of fractal. Not Mandelbrot or Julia sets.
Like this:
I have a Flickr gallery with more SeebsFrac samples. (These are just uploaded from the phone at "Medium" resolution, I'll do one at Full some time just so people can see it.)
How do I change the fractal?
Drag points of the path (this is the line in red when you start out) around. The leftmost point can't be dragged. If you tap or drag the midpoint of a line, you create a new point there. If you double-tap a point, it gets removed.
Are there any other settings?
Yes. The little (i) button lets you access settings. That's all one page on the iPad, but several separate pages (note the scroll indicator at the bottom of the screen) on the iPhone.
What do the settings mean?
Lines and points: By default, I draw lines. You can change it to draw points. You can draw both lines AND points. The min/max settings indicate the lowest depth that will be drawn (1 is the pattern you defined, 2 is the first iteration from that, and so on) and the highest.
Each line segment has four flags available. "Hide" means that line segment is not drawn. "Prune" means that the line segment doesn't get iterated on. "Flip X" and "Flip Y" change the way that iterations are done on a given segment; basically, X flips left to right, Y flips up and down.
The maximum depth varies with these settings somewhat; in general, if you want more depth, use fewer points, or set a couple of them to "Prune". Under the hood, this comes out to basically "will I have to plot more than 100,000 points? If so, that's too much depth."
Okay, what about those color settings?
This part's a bit hard to explain. The whole thing is built around the HSV color model. Value is just brightness; value of 0 is black. Saturation is how colorful something is. A saturation of 0 runs from black (value 0) to white (value 1). Hue is the actual color part of the color. A hue of 0 would be red (with value and saturation both 1). Hue 0, saturation .5, and value 1 will be pink. Hue goes red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, purple, fuschia, and back to red again; a hue of 1 is red just like a hue of 0 is.
Colors are defined by first defining the "base" color, which is the color of the Depth 1 line, and then by defining the "tweak" value. The idea is, over the course of all the lines being drawn, each of hue, saturation, and value will move by the "tweak" values from what they start at. So, if saturation and value tweaks are zero, and hue tweak is 1, you start from red and cycle through towards purple and red again. If hue tweak is 2, you go from red through blue to red twice.
I don't get it.
Just, you know. Mess with it. It's sorta fun.
That's so beautiful. I love it.
Hit the + button and it'll show up in your photo album.
Can I save and restore things?
Not yet. And yes, I want that feature too. I just thought I'd reached a point where this was enough fun to play with that I could justify putting it up for a buck.
I have more questions!
I have been known to respond to email; try
seebsfrac@seebs.net.Bug fixes/version history
1.0.1 (December 28, 2010)
Submitted for review, may show up in a day or so.
- Added shake-to-randomize.
- Now support both landscape modes, not just one of them.
- Fixed some internal logic problems.
- Changed color handling; if you draw more than one line, the last line drawn is always of the fully-tweaked value, rather than being consistently 2/3, 4/5, 6/7 (etc.) of the way there...
- Point creation now works consistently, although it will sometimes have to automatically decrease depth.
- Maximum depth adjusted slightly to allow one more iteration for a couple of common pretty pictures.
- Maximum depth calculations more consistent, and no overruns now.
- Last point is now fixed at (1, 0). This doesn't mean you can't do the awesome-looking disjoint fractals that moving it produced; it just means you have to set the last line segment to Hide, Prune to do them. This was a component of getting the depth calculations right.
- Now supports iOS 4.1, as well as 4.2. I hope.
1.0 (December 20, 2010)
Initial release.