News

Mandlebrot Explorer images used by online racing team

I always love hearing from people who have used Mandlebrot Explorer creatively in their own projects.

I recently received an email from a member of the McOffoven Racing Team, competing in the online GT3 motor racing game, The Sim Grid, showing Mandelbrot Explorer images in the livery on one of their team cars.

Beautiful, don't you agree?

Version 3.4 - An Overdue Release

Today, Mandelbrot Explorer version 3.4 was released. This is somewhat overdue, given the previous release was over 5 years ago.

This doesn't introduce any big new features, but it was a chance to fix several things that had broken since 3.3 was released in January 2011. It also signifies a return to active development - expect work on 3.5 to begin soon!

Version 3.4

A new website theme

The Mandelbrot Explorer website was looking quite tired and dated - it's now got a brand new theme.

That means it's now fully responsive - it will display and view correctly on small-screen devices. (Mandelbrot Explorer needs Windows to run, but the website gets many visits from all kinds of devices).

There are still a few CSS issues to iron out here and there, but hopefully the site is easier to use. Version 3.4 is nearly ready for release — watch out for a release announcement shortly.

Kuler Colour Themes not working

We apologise, but we've just discovered that one of the popular features of Mandelbrot Explorer is not working at the moment.

To help find colour schemes that look good, and to use the creative work that others have shared, Mandelbrot Explorer lets you search for colour schemes using the Adobe's Kuler engine. See the documentation for this feature.

Adobe appear to have changed the way their API works, such that Mandelbrot Explorer fails when it searches Kuler for colour schemes.

Version 3.3: Multiple processors, better progress reports, Facebook integration

The day before yesterday, version 3.3 of Mandelbrot Explorer was released. Here's what it looks like:

Mandelbrot Explorer 3.3

There are a number of new features, and they are listed in full on the version history page. I shall draw attention to the 3 main ones.

3.3 Beta 1 supports multiple processing cores

The release of the first Beta for forthcoming version 3.3 includes a major change. Machine with multiple processors, or with multi-core processors, are now fully supported. This means that such machines can speed up their calculations by a factor of 2, 4 or even 6. Current trends suggest that future computers will have more processing cores, as opposed to faster processors, so this increase in speed will be even more significant in the future.

Sad news

We, at Mandelbrot Explorer, were very sad to hear of the recent death of Benoit Mandelbrot. Mandelbrot was a mathematician who did much to research the properties of fractals and of fractal geometry. It is a fitting honour to his work that the Mandelbrot Set was named after him. Benoit Mandelbrot died on Thursday (14th October 2010) because of pancreatic cancer. His work did much to introduce many people to a branch of mathematics, who would otherwise have had no interest in maths; the news of his passing is sad news indeed.

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