Explore
Scroll to zoom into whatever is under the cursor. Drag to pan — one button on the toolbar turns the same drag into a rotation. Hold the right button over a Mandelbrot and a live preview of the Julia set at that point follows the cursor: let go and you are in it.
The shelf
Every family takes parameters — degree, exponents, constants, thresholds — and the panel rebuilds itself around whichever one you are in. So each of the names below is a shelf of shapes, not a single image.
The family picker. Every thumbnail is that family drawn by Fractaria, with the color you are using right now — so the grid shows what you would get, not an icon of it.
How you move
The zoom happens around the cursor, not the middle of the window, so the thing you were looking at stays where you were looking at it. Keep going: on most of the families, when ordinary double precision runs out the engine switches by itself to arithmetic that measures the distance from a reference orbit. The rest stop where double stops — and either way the status bar says where the precision stands, down to the words AT THE LIMIT.
Pan by dragging. Switch the pointer to Rotate — one button on the toolbar — and the same drag turns the whole plane; one turn and it hands the pointer back, because straightening a picture is something you do once. The frame you export is the frame you set, rotation included.
Every point of a Mandelbrot is the address of a whole Julia set. Hold the right button and a live preview of that Julia follows the cursor while you hunt for the constant you like, with a dot on the point it is drawn from. Let go and it opens on that point; press Esc while you hold and nothing changed.
Undo covers the exploring, not only the settings: the history keeps a hundred states — where you have been as well as what you changed — and a continuous zoom lands in it as one step instead of one per frame. It is written out when you quit, so yesterday's steps are still there. And from inside a Julia there is a shorter way home: M puts you back on the map you came from, at the exact frame you left.
Exploring tools
Deep inside a fractal every view looks like it could be anywhere. The Instruments window (Cmd/Ctrl+K) is where you find out where you actually are: one tab of numbers you can read and rewrite — the center, the zoom, the rotation, the two corners the view runs between — and one tab of seven overlays that draw on top of the picture without touching what you export. Every one of them is a switch, and every one is off until you ask.
The period atlas writes on each bulb the period of the cycle inside it, which is the closest thing a fractal has to a street map: the numbers tell you what kind of spiral is down each road before you go. You are here puts a small map in the corner with the opening view and a mark on where you are looking, for when the zoom number has stopped meaning anything. Cursor cross and tape reads out the point under the pointer rather than the center of the view, and orbit under the pointer draws the sequence that point actually walks — which is the difference between looking at a fractal and watching one being made.
The atlas over a live view, and the drawer it comes out of. Overlays never touch what you export — and the atlas writes no number a second pass could not confirm, which on a graphics card leaves some bulbs blank. A third line in the caption says so when it happens.
One purchase, everything included — the animation editor too, not a tier above it. No subscription, no unlocks: every fractal, every palette and every export size the application can make, from the first run.
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