GNU XaoS - Real-time fractal zoomer that also displays user-defined fractal formulas.
XaoS is an interactive fractal zoomer. It allows the user to continuously to zoom in or out of a fractal in a fluid, continuous motion. This capability makes XaoS great for exploring fractals, and it's just plain fun!
If you don't know what fractals are, don't worry! XaoS includes many animated tutorials that make learning about fractals fun and easy. These tutorials are also a great introduction to all of XaoS's features.
XaoS is able to display many different fractal types, including Barnsley, Mandelbrot, Phoenix, Newton and many more. Fractals can be rendered using various coloring methods and planes for an almost endless variety of images. XaoS also supports switching between Julia and Mandelbrot sets for each formula.
What's New in This Release:
Cross-platform changes
New Italian translation courtesy of Sergio Zanchetta
Updated catalog and i18n for German by Andreas Madritsch
Bug fix to prevent garbled characters when using non-English languages
on modern systems using UTF-8
Bug fix to prevent XaoS from crashing after using the Render Animation
functionality
Bug fix to prevent incorrect colors on smooth coloring modes with
certain video modes
Mac-specific changes
This is a huge release for Mac users. The Mac user interface has been
completely rewritten in Cocoa and improved in a number of ways:
Standard Aqua dialog boxes instead of the strange-looking Unixy things
in previous versions. Fields in dialog boxes now support cut and paste
as you would expect.
Pop-up menus are now displayed using standard Aqua menus
Menu bar in full-screen mode is now the standard Mac OS X menu bar. It
automatically slides into view when you move your mouse to the top of
the screen and slides out when you move away from it.
XaoS now has a standard Aqua about dialog box, which displays links to
license and credits in help file.
Help is now displayed via Mac OS X's standard help viewer. Tutorials
can still be launched via links in the help viewer.
Support for opening xpf (Saved Position) and xaf (Saved Animation)
files directly from Finder via drag and drop and by double-clicking.
XaoS now includes its own document icon for these files as well.
Support for basic AppleScriptability via the standard script
dictionary. Includes things like opening files and manipulating the
window, but no XaoS-specific functionality.
Support for panning the fractal with the mouse scroll wheel or
trackpad two-finger gestures.
In addition to the user interface improvements, XaoS for Mac has the
following improvements:
Now uses greater precision (long double) for calculations to enable
much deeper zooms.
In addition to English, XaoS for Mac OS X now supports the following
languages: Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Romanian, and
Spanish.
Integration with Stone Design's Videator (http://stone.com/Videator/).
XaoS can now send live a live video stream to Videator, which can then
do post-processing using Mac OS X's core video technology. This is
great for VJing (live video performance art). See
http://stone.com/Videator/VJ.html for more details.
Edge Detection and Pseudo 3D filters now work correctly. Fixed a
bug that previously caused them to render the image completely black.
Experimental GTK Port
An experimental GTK user interface has been added in the src/ui/ui-drv/gtk
directory. Eventually we hope to replace the old X11 interface with this
one so that XaoS will blend in seamlessly with the GNOME environment.
Right now, this port is incomplete and it should be considered an alpha-
quality preview. As such, the GTK port will not be compiled by default.
You must explicitly enable it using the following configure switch:
--with-gtk-driver=yes
In addition, we recommend you disable all other drivers when using the GTK
driver using the following configure switches:
--with-x11-driver=no
--with-dga-driver=no
--with-ggi-driver=no
--with-aa-driver=no
Please do not report bugs against the GTK driver. We know that it is very
buggy and we are working to rapidly improve it. If you want to help with the
GTK driver's development, please contact the xaos-devel mailing list first,
since it is likely that your patches could conflict with the rapid development
that is taking place on this driver.
Mac Categories
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