New version of Fractal Explorer (v2.0.0) went live on Google Play.
With this update you can finally:
- control depth of fractal rendering – you can either set it to constant value, or you can specify starting value and a “zoom factor” that will increase depth as you zoom in
- create your own color schemes
- control how coloring is done – you can either set how many times a color scheme is applied across the whole depth of the fractal, or you can set the “depth range” of a color scheme, so the number of repeats will depend on the depth
- add the wallpaper to your gallery – this will save it as JPG image, and allows you to share it from your photo gallery application
That’s not all, of course. There are many smaller changes. First of all, UI has been updated to Holo theme and action bar has been added. There’s now only one list of cool places.
New high quality mode has been added that produces much better looking images, especially for fractals with lots of abrupt color changes. Those busy looking fractals are much smoother looking in this mode. There’s a major performance hit to it, so you will probably not use it normally, unless you have a really powerful device. Wallpapers are always rendered using this mode, so that they look the best.
Tegra 3 users will now enjoy much faster rendering times, as the new version uses multithreading to make all those cores crunching. My tests on Asus Transformer Prime show nearly 400% increase in performance. It’s much more noticeable for very deep fractals. Other multi-core CPUs should also give you a speed boost, although that may vary from device to device. For example, I was not able to force my LG phone with dual core OMAP processor to utilize it’s full power.
And tablet users can now use Fractal Explorer comfortably, as it no longer forces portrait orientation.
Finally, as of this update, support for devices with old Android versions (below Froyo) or low-end CPUs has been dropped.
Hope you’ll enjoy this update.
Have fun.
