XaoS is an interactive fractal zoomer. It allows the user to continuously to zoom in or out of a fractal in a fluid, continuous motion. This capability makes XaoS great for exploring fractals, and it's just plain fun!
XaoS can display many different fractal types, including Mandelbrot, Barnsley, Newton, Phoenix, and many more. Fractals can be rendered using various coloring methods and planes for an almost endless variety of images. XaoS also supports switching between Julia and Mandelbrot sets for each formula.
XaoS includes many animated tutorials that make learning about fractals fun and easy. These tutorials are also a great introduction to all of XaoS's features.
XaoS is free software, licensed under the GPL. It was originally written by Thomas Marsh and Jan Hubicka, and it is currently maintained by Zoltan Kovacs. Countless other improvements have been contributed by volunteers around the world. Because it's free software, anyone can help improve XaoS.
Mac-specific changes
This is a huge release for Mac users. The Mac user interface has been completely rewritten in Cocoa and improved in a number of ways:
- Standard Aqua dialog boxes instead of the strange-looking Unixy things in previous versions. Fields in dialog boxes now support cut and paste as you would expect.
- Pop-up menus are now displayed using standard Aqua menus
- Menu bar in full-screen mode is now the standard Mac OS X menu bar. It automatically slides into view when you move your mouse to the top of the screen and slides out when you move away from it.
- XaoS now has a standard Aqua about dialog box, which displays links to license and credits in help file.
- Help is now displayed via Mac OS X's standard help viewer. Tutorials can still be launched via links in the help viewer.
- Support for opening xpf (Saved Position) and xaf (Saved Animation) files directly from Finder via drag and drop and by double-clicking. XaoS now includes its own document icon for these files as well.
- Support for basic AppleScriptability via the standard script dictionary. Includes things like opening files and manipulating the window, but no XaoS-specific functionality.
- Support for panning the fractal with the mouse scroll wheel or trackpad two-finger gestures.
In addition to the user interface improvements, XaoS for Mac has the following improvements:
- Now uses greater precision (long double) for calculations to enable much deeper zooms.
- In addition to English, XaoS for Mac OS X now supports the following languages: Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Romanian, and Spanish.
- Integration with Stone Design's Videator (http://stone.com/Videator/). XaoS can now send live a live video stream to Videator, which can then do post-processing using Mac OS X's core video technology. This is great for VJing (live video performance art). See http://stone.com/Videator/VJ.html for more details.
- Edge Detection and Pseudo 3D filters now work correctly. Fixed a bug that previously caused them to render the image completely black.
Cross-platform changes
- New Italian translation courtesy of Sergio Zanchetta
- Updated catalog and i18n for German by Andreas Madritsch
- Bug fix to prevent garbled characters when using non-English languages on modern systems using UTF-8
- Bug fix to prevent XaoS from crashing after using the Render Animation functionality
- Bug fix to prevent incorrect colors on smooth coloring modes with certain video modes
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