Fractal kings return with a breathtaking iOS app
Fractal freaks get ready: There’s a new fractal app in town. Frax for the iPhone and iPad, which launched today, comes to you from the legendary team of Kai Krause and Ben Weiss, the gurus behind Kai’s Power Tools, Kai’s Power Goo, KPT Convolver, and other graphic art and design software. These artistic visionaries, in league with fractal wizard Tom Beddard, have launched Frax as a unique way to create, view, and interact with the beauty of the fractal universe. And it’s stunning.
One look at Frax confirms that neither Krause nor Weiss has lost his creative vision—but touch is what Frax is all about. From pinch and swipe gestures to accelerometer-based rotate-to-fly and tilt-to-steer movements, Frax for iOS features numerous ways to explore the classic fractal forms of the Mandelbrot and Julia sets while sitting on your couch or riding the subway.
The Frax signature Default Spiral fractal preset.
Fractal past reenvisioned
Frax may be new to iOS, but its antecedents reach back to an older Mac program of the same name, created some 20 years ago. Indeed, for more than a generation, artists and mathematicians have used desktop computers to try to re-create these natural life forms.
In the 1990s, fractal design and generation frequently pushed underpowered hardware to the limit, sometimes taking hours to painfully paint a single fractal form onscreen—a far cry from endlessly replicating its structure to infinity, a fractal’s ultimate mission. But today’s Retina display iPads and iPhones are powerful enough to make fractals accessible—even easy—to view, create, and interact with.
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