iBoxplorer (for real this time)

[CthulhusPetals]

I've learned a great deal about iPhone programming and was sick of showing people my embarrassing old iBoxplorer app. So I took another swing at it.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/s_EUllcgKao&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/s_EUllcgKao&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1</a>

(Watch on youtube instead of inline for better quality)

As you can see, I'm doing much better. I want to finish up some minor things like giving credit to individual fragment shader authors. As soon as I hear back from them I should be able to update the app quickly and then get it in the queue. I'm planning to ask $3 but I'll give away free copies to fractal forums members as the shaders are clearly a community effort.

This demo is on a 4th gen iPad. You can run it on the iPad2 & iPad mini but you won't be quite so happy. I will be targeting iPad 2 and up.

Oh yeah: The 1024 resolution is retina only so that's 3rd and 4th gen ipads only. Retina renderings look amazing.

Charlie Reiman

[lycium]

I'm planning to ask $3 but I'll give away free copies to fractal forums members as the shaders are clearly a community effort.

I can't tell if this is gratuity or admission that you're selling other people's code...

[CthulhusPetals]

A fair comment. iBoxplorer contains none of the SDL based code from Boxplorer itself. It is not a port. It does use the camera movement stuff though it's repackaged for objective-c. The shaders are ported to OpenGLES; a feat that takes me about an hour or two. But more importantly, I've already asked rrrola (over a year ago) and he gave his ok and pointed out it's all under the ISC licence. I am also trying to contact the individual shader authors where ever possible. The shader's I've selected have no copyright statements in them at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license

As far as I can tell I'm perfectly free to do what I'm doing based on the ISC licence. If you know otherwise, please let me know ASAP.

[hobold]

The shader's I've selected have no copyright statements in them at all.

Depending on which jurisdiction the respective authors reside in, "no copyright statement" does not imply "no copyrights". For example in Germany, the legal default is that the author retains all rights. Due to international treaties between Germany and, for example, the Unites States of America, a hypothetical German author could (at least in theory) uphold his rights in an American court.

Copyright is a minefield. Be careful.

[lycium]

Even if it's perfectly legal, I don't understand why you'd go right back to the very people you took the code from, and try to "charitably" reduce the price to sell it right back to them...

I'd be pretty annoyed if that were my code being sold, and this kind of thing serves as a good reference for why someone might not want to release their code publically.

[eiffie]

As long as your not claiming you own the rights to these scripts I don't think anyone here is going to give you trouble - I could be wrong though. If you can make money at this more power to you!

[marius]

As long as your not claiming you own the rights to these scripts I don't think anyone here is going to give you trouble - I could be wrong though. If you can make money at this more power to you!

Also, why not share what you have learned and open source your app?
You can still put it in the appstore and charge sheeple for the service of packaging.

[CthulhusPetals]

Also, why not share what you have learned and open source your app?
You can still put it in the appstore and charge sheeple for the service of packaging.

I'd be happy to share the tweaked shaders and what I had to do to make them touch-friendly. I'd be delighted to aid someone if they wanted to do the Android version. I do not plan release the iOS code though as I put plenty of work into it. I have the right to decide how I licence my work, as does everyone else.

[lycium]

I have the right to decide how I licence my work, as does everyone else.

Not necessarily, and that's why Hobold suggested caution. For example if any of the code you used is GPL, then you are bound by the "copyleft" clauses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Copyleft

[Syntopia]

Hi CthulhusPetals, looking forward to trying out your fractal app - it looks great.

A few comments about the licensing:

Depending on which jurisdiction the respective authors reside in, "no copyright statement" does not imply "no copyrights". For example in Germany, the legal default is that the author retains all rights. Due to international treaties between Germany and, for example, the Unites States of America, a hypothetical German author could (at least in theory) uphold his rights in an American court.

This is also the case for all the 165 countries who have ratified the Berne convention. "No copyright statement" means the author holds the copyright.

Notice, that the web site may impose copyright restrictions as well. For instance, FractalForums.com, states the german copyright law applies to anything posted here: http://www.fractalforums.com/index.php?action=impressum

So you have to ask the authors of the shader snippets for permission to use their work in your app, if they haven't stated any license. Notice that in many cases the ideas encapsulated in the code fragments could probably be rewritten quite easily in new code.

I have had a few questions from other people about the shaders included in Fragmentarium. While I did ask the authors (mostly Knighty and Kali) for permission to distribute the shaders, the authors still retain the copyright. This means that if you use any shader from Fragmentarium, you must ask the authors for permission (unless they have stated a license). The Fragmentarium code itself may be used under either GPL or LGPL. That doesn't mean I will not allow my code to be used in commercial, closed source software - you just have to get permission first.

I think all would benefit if the people posting code here attached a line stating the license. GPL/LGPL is really not well suited for for short code snippets, because of: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLOmitPreamble, but I think the creative commons license might be suitable. Especially the attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) if you want to get attributed, or the public domain dedication if you don't care about attribution: http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

Finally, I agree that everyone should be allowed to choose how they license and share their works, as long as they don't break other peoples copyright. There are great examples of both closed-source fractal software (Mandelbulb 3D) and commercial software (Ultra Fractal), and obviously a place for both.

[Blace]

While I understand that people have spent time and effort writing the snippets of code that you are incorporating into your program, I think that giving away free copies to forum members is great and I'm looking forward to giving it a try once it's done! Since licensing and copyright issues have come up I thought I'd mention the differences between the Simplified or Free BSD license which also allows commercial works to be created and avoids the GPL copyleft scenario, if that is the intent of the writer. I've just been learning more about this recently and have run across people who feel very strongly about certain aspects of licensing, both if it was built using free open source code then it should be free or sure I made this and give it out for free if you can incorporate it into something that makes money give me credit for my part and go for it. While I'm still getting better at coding I have plenty of time before I have to worry about people ever using my code let alone the possibility that they could make money off of it.    

[CthulhusPetals]

It's available: http://appstore.com/iboxplorer

You should know:

1. I goofed up and targeted iOS 6.1 so it won't work unless you have 6.1 The next release will target 5.1 and up.

2. Apple is only letting me give away 50 promo codes per version. I know it used to be 100 but there's not much I can do.

3. iPad only. It's not an iPhone app though I think it might be fun to work up some sort of iPhone edition if I can work out the controls.

4. Codes expire 4 weeks after I get them. So I haven't requested any and I'll be fetching them in small batches. Which means there might be some delay in getting them out as I don't want to request them until they're needed.

So PM me here on FF if you want a code.

You can read the manual at http://www.nanomoai.com/iphone-projects/iboxplorer/.
There's some technical jibber-jabber at http://www.nanomoai.com/iphone-projects/iboxplorer/technical/

The source for the modified shaders can be found at the links at the bottom of the technical jibber-jabber article as well as some of the iOS code related to OpenGLES.

[Fracturbator]

I'm playing with this on my iPad at the moment - pretty cool to have a 3d fractal renderer on an iPad !
The ability to set key frames and generate animations would be even better ...

[Fracturbator]

you can get some interesting results with iBoxplorer and it's good fun to play with. I look forward to seeing some more options built into future versions. Keyframes and animations would be at the top of my list. It's a good start, though.

Here are some of my doodlings with it:



A Gamma adjustment might have helped with that second one ...
(more on my dA gallery: http://jniemann666.deviantart.com/gallery/)

Cheers