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Hello everyone

I'd like to present my fractal application for Android phones. It's called Fractal Explorer and is available now from Android Market and AndAppStore.

The application is nowhere near as functional as desktop applications and can't produce such fantastic images, but it:
- can make use of modern smartphone CPUs and is the fastest of it's kind at the moment
- works on Android 1.5 and up
- supports zoom scale up to 2^42
- is very easy to use
- offers 11 color schemes
- can save the cool places you find
- let's you generate wallpaper for your phone

You can find more info, screenshots and example zoom slideshows on the Fractal Explorer homepage (http://blackdotmobile.com/)

At the moment it only supports the most widely recognizable Mandelbrot fractal and simple coloring using predefined color schemes, but more features will be added with time.

I'd very like to hear some comments and suggestions from people that love fractals. What would you like in a fractal application running on your phone?

(http://blackdotmobile.com/screenshots/glass_pane.jpg) (http://blackdotmobile.com/screenshots/cool_places.jpg)

QR code for Android Market download:
(http://blackdotmobile.com/qr_mfe_am.png)

I would welcome the use of programmable shaders on the OpenGL ES capable models for fast preview quality rendering up to a certain zoom depth. One should be able to render Mandelbulbs with this method too, I think - and near realtime.

I was looking into the possibility of using OpenGL ES 2.0 for computations, but the problem is that it only supports single precision floats. Heck, now that I think about it, double precision is not enough either and I'll have too see if doing arbitrary precision math makes sense for mobile CPU (performance wise). As for Mandelbulbs, I don't think I have enough knowledge to even attempt implementing such thing. For now at least :)

Something close to DP can be emulated using two SP floats. But will be putting about 4-8 times the computational load on the graphics chip, losing much of the advantage over the CPU. The idea was to use this only for preview and do the final quality render on the CPU.

Well, using GPU to do computations is definitely something worth looking into (and would be useful for other purposes as well), but it'll have to wait. Right now I'll concentrate on extending and polishing it little by little.

single float is enough for magnifications ~1000 ( correct me if its wrong )
but for mandelbulbs it could lead to a nice effect, because it is 3d, you have far more to explore, even at low zooming levels

but you are right, i would love using an arbitrary gpu number system, but this is just a dream, and believe me,
double precision isnt enough ... ;(

Im gonna try this one!
Wow bar code scanner for the android is so smooth, i used it to grab the QR code, Fractal Explorer downloaded just like that! I also got the laser level from tat site too!