Show HN: Mandelbrot Maps, a real-time Mandelbrot/Julia fractal app for Android

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.ac.ed.inf.mandelbrotmaps

by withad • 14 years ago

1 1 14 years ago

$Preview of Show HN: Mandelbrot Maps, a real-time Mandelbrot/Julia fractal app for Android$ play.google.com

withad• 14 years ago

I'm a student at the University of Edinburgh and Mandelbrot Maps on Android is my undergraduate dissertation project. I've spent a big chunk of the last few months porting the original Mandelbrot Maps web applet [1] (created by a previous student a few years ago) to Android phones and tablets.

The app is a (rather good, if I do say so myself) fractal generator for the Mandelbrot and Julia sets but its main innovative feature is letting users see the relationship between the two. There's a unique Julia set fractal for each point in the Mandelbrot set and Mandelbrot Maps lets you see them change in real-time by dragging a pin around the latter. If you zoom in, you can see similarities between a Julia fractal and the area in the Mandelbrot fractal that parametrises it, particularly along the edge of the Mandelbrot.

There are also interesting relationships between positions in the Mandelbrot's bulbs and the overall shape of the Julia fractals, as demonstrated in [2].

The code is open-source and can be found at the GitHub page linked from the Store page above, as the developer's website. It's in a bit of a state right now as my deadline is approaching rapidly, and I'm sure there are things in there that are hardly best practice for Android, but I'm intending to tidy it up after the end of the semester.

If you liked using the app (or didn't like it, or even just thought it was mediocre), please leave a rating or a review on the Google Play Store page. There's also a survey linked in the app's description that would give me even more useful feedback. It would all be extremely helpful for my dissertation (as well as for anyone working on the project next year).

If anyone has any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.

[1] http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/mandelbrot-maps/mmaps.h...

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eeINusNbUs

Show HN: Mandelbrot Maps, a real-time Mandelbrot/Julia fractal app for Android

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