Applets
I have written some little bits of Java code that might be of interest to some people. In particular, the only code I am putting up here at the moment is a fractal viewing applet. When run in a web browser, its performance is catastrophic, but a lot of that is due to the very high quality (lots of iterations are needed to get the smooth shading looking good).
Version 0.22 is now done. I still have a sizable (and growing) list of tasks, but the new improvements include better multithreading, cached offscreen areas for smoother scrolling, and more fractal types.
This latest version also includes (reasonably) smooth zooming, though there is a small jump at the end of zooms that I have not yet ironed out.
The controls are simple: use left mouse to zoom in/out, right mouse to pan, and middle or ‘O’ to bring up an (very crude) options box.
Tasks still remaining are:
- Switch from doubles to bignums at high zoom levels
- Julia sets
- Different colour mappings (All the maths used to generate different metrics of distance from the set are easy, but mapping those to nice colours is less interesting to me... Red does get a bit boring after a while though!)
- Properly exploit multiple cores
- Allow a permutation of the plane (e.g. plot reciprocals of pixels).
- Add orbits investigation
- More types of fractals!