HTML5 Fractal Playground 1.1, April 6, 2014

Last month, I wrote about a new personal open-source project that I just put out called "HTML5 Fractal Playground". In the intervening days, I have had time to tinker with the program some more and I've added some features that will be important for anyone who wants to use the program to learn about fractals.

• I fixed a bug that prevented Firefox's asm.js from properly optimizing the speed of the computations whenever the size of the plot is not a power of two.
• I added an HTML5 progress widget that displays the progress of performing the computations so that the user isn't staring at a blank plot while waiting for long-running computations to take place.
• I added an option to allow the maximum number of iterations to compute to increase as you zoom in on the fractal. This is probably the single best thing I've added because it allows you to easily zoom in and see much more detail than you normally would in the first version.
• Finally, I completely revamped the way that colors are chosen to correspond with different escape iterations. In the first version, any point that escaped in one iteration was black, and any point that more than about 50 iterations to escape was bright blue, and any point inside the fractal was black. In the new version, the colors are chosen so that they are relative to the maximum and minimum number of iterations to escape found for the chosen coordinates.

I think that I have the functionality to draw the fractals working very well, and so for the next version, I would like to improve the user interface. I like that I have written this so that the user can modify the code that computes the fractal, but I do recognize that this is too advanced for most users. I would like to offer the user the option to select from a number of fractals from a drop-down list or the like. I also would like to put most of the controls in a dialog box so that that can be shown and hidden, instead of the user having to scroll up and down.

Finally, I would like to eventually introduce other ways of coloring the plot.

On to HTML5 Fractal Playground

A deep zoom on the following coordinates rendered this image which would not have been feasible with the previous version:
Minimum Real Part: -0.15295470977798267
Maximum Real Part: -0.15286695268191625
Minimum Imaginary Part: -1.0389919858899233
Maximum Imaginary Part: -1.0389042287938568