"Free iCandy" for the iPhone (3GS and 4 using OS 4+)

[David Makin]

Hi all,

On Thursday we submitted "Free iCandy" to the Apple App Store, it should appear for download within 7 to 14 days (assuming it doesn't get rejected for any reason).

It is "Free" because it uses iAds - but we will probably be releasing a paid for version without the ads at some point, though there are issues as to what we could call it since we can't use the same name

Free iCandy is a realtime Julia animation program that has a choice of 32 formulas, though basically these are all z^p+c with p either 2,3,4 or 1.5 and the other alternatives are produced by also adding z and/or adding zold, and/or pre-calculating z = z*z/cabs(z) prior to the main calculation.
There are also well over 100 colouring modes available including many orbit trap options plus smooth iteration, smooth magnitude, cilia (cells, bricks, interpolation, smooth interpolation), smooth angles, triangle inequality average and curvature average.

The code uses shader 2 hence there's a minimum hardware requirement of iPhone 3GS and the program also needs OS 4+.

The Julia seed values used are deliberately chosen to avoid large areas of "inside" to avoid major slow-downs in animation speed, this has the side effect that sometimes the animation "jumps" a little, but this was vastly preferable to leaving in the large areas of "inside".

Plain z^2+c generally seems to run between 15 and 25 fps, unfortunately some of the options run slower (worst case down to around 5 fps).
You can manually explore (just touch and drag) or leave it in auto-animation mode (where the Julia seed used follows a computed path) or in sound-animation mode where the Julia seed is altered based on sound from microphone input - this is really *awesome* !!!
You can of course also change the palette - the palette used is actually implimented as a 2D texture so allows both colour scrolling (using a vertical offset) and palette scrolling (using a horizontal offset), you can turn the colour scrolling/palette scrolling on or off.
Also you can switch to texture mapping mode where you get 2 alternative ways of mapping a texture into the fractal (point orbit trap or Cilia bricks).
The palette/texture used can be either chosen using a colourwheel or from the device's photo library or you can directly take a photograph from the app to use as either a mapped texture or the colour palette.

Hope you iPhone owners like it !!

[cbuchner1]

As I don't have an iphone, would you mind posting some 2 minute clip of this program in action on Youtube?

Christian

[David Makin]

He hasn't done it yet, but I'm pretty sure the guy I work with (Steve Parys of Parys Technografx) will be organising a demo video of the app to go on YouTube.

One point I should make is that Free iCandy renders (filling the screen) at 320*480 or 480*320 resolution when animating or on 3GS hardware but if all animation and colour cycling is stopped then on iPhone 4 hardware it renders (full screen) at the full 640*960 or 960*640 resolution (but reduces down again when animation restarts).

A quick 2 finger tap brings up the colourwheel and other options.
A single finger quick tap toggles the animation between programmed (sound or auto) mode and manual mode.
A single finger touch & drag allows manual animation in the usual Julia switch type manner (i.e. as if you were switching from a fixed-size Mandelbrot).
Also you have full 2 finger control of pinch/stretch zoomng (to limits), panning and rotation.

[David Makin]

Now available for download in the USA from the US app. store:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/free-icandy/id381061184?mt=8&uo=4

[David Makin]

As I don't have an iphone, would you mind posting some 2 minute clip of this program in action on Youtube?

Christian

Here's the first demo video (I'm not really happy with it, Steve didn't spend long enough choosing which fractal formula/colouring options show it off best).

http://www.parystec.com/icandy/making.html

It definitely needs a better demo of the animation to music !

[cbuchner1]

Now available for download in the USA from the US app. store:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/free-icandy/id381061184?mt=8&uo=4

Why is this not available on the European app store? I wanted to try it on my wife's iphone 3GS. what's the point of limiting this app's reach?

EDIT: it could not show up because may wife may not have updated to iOS 4.0 yet. Sorry for yelling

[David Makin]

Now available for download in the USA from the US app. store:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/free-icandy/id381061184?mt=8&uo=4

Why is this not available on the European app store? I wanted to try it on my wife's iphone 3GS. what's the point of limiting this app's reach?

EDIT: it could not show up because may wife may not have updated to iOS 4.0 yet. Sorry for yelling

"Free iCandy" is free because it uses iAds, which at the moment are only supported properly in the USA - i.e. all our income on this version comes from the display of iAds (and click-throughs).

This week I am removing the iAds and we will be releasing a version for iPhone/iTouch and iPad that will be around 99cents, probably called iCandy 99 - this will be available everywhere.

*Please note* that this "commercial version" will obviously have no ads and will work on iOS 3+ *but* still requires iPhone/iTouch hardware that has OpenGL ES2 support i.e. that supports shader 2 code - this means iPhone 3GS equivalent devices or newer (and all iPads) but not iPhone 3G or older.