
“The beauty of Frax is that it doesn’t have to do anything,” says Tom Beddard. The idea is that anyone can enjoy Frax without having to give it much thought. But today’s Retina display iPads and iPhones are powerful enough to make fractals accessible-even easy-to view, create, and interact with.Īs an interactive visualizer, Frax is part game, part entertainment, part design tool, part scholarly investigation, and wholly mesmerizing. 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. Indeed, for more than a generation, artists and mathematicians have used desktop computers to try to re-create these natural life forms. Fractal past reenvisionedįrax may be new to iOS, but its antecedents reach back to an older Mac program of the same name, created some 20 years ago.


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. One look at Frax confirms that neither Krause nor Weiss has lost his creative vision-but touch is what Frax is all about. 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. 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.

All you have to do is unzip the download and open index.html in your default browser.įractal freaks get ready: There’s a new fractal app in town. There's no installation, as the package is hosted within a web page. Mandelbrot Fractal is a good-looking and easy-to-use JavaScript-based fractal generator.

Ultra Fractal 6 is a great way to create your own fractal art. It is very easy to use and yet more capable than any other fractal program. Ultra Fractal is a great way to create your own fractal art.
