App Reviews

“C'est superbe. What a wonderful tool
and so fast…on a phone!?”
Benoit Mandelbrot (seeing an early test of Frax at TED 2010, just months before his death at 85)

“Easily the most gorgeous app ever to grace iOS!
It made me all teary-eyed just looking at it,
so smooth, so beautiful, so fast.
It’s the mathematical fabric of the universe coming alive before your very eyes. 🙂
It is going to be a phenomenal educational tool, beyond its obvious artistic value.
I totally love it!”
Andrea Pessino ('Ready at Dawn Inc')

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FRACTALS : From tree branches and river beds to galactic spirals – Nature is full of examples of fractal shapes. An equation as tiny as a fingernail generates the 'Mandelbrot Set' – an early step to visualize the mathematics of complexity.

20 years ago this team created a fractal explorer called 'Frax' and became curious "What could we do on an iPhone today?" The reborn Frax, now orchestrating new algorithms in an intricate dance between CPU and GPU is literally…
…400 times faster!

Totally immersive in realtime you can now zoom into more than a trillion-to-one depth range of the classic Mandelbrot set and, for the first time ever, the more self-similar Julia sets can be zoomed… infinitely!

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And you explore the wonderful shapes and forms
with multi-touch gestures, 20 of them in four sets!
literally pinching, swiping, rotating to fly into it – and then tilting to steer…

Frax raises the fractal in 3D height, uses complex color gradients to smoothly tint and shade them, adds two light sources for glossy reflections and infinitely scaleable chaotic textures – all in all using almost 100 parameters and controls!

What that really means is: it creates images that are quite unlike anything you have seen before! Intricate patterns, spirals, valleys, supersmooth or wildly chaotic, metallic sheen or pearly white, subtle shades, stark monochrome or screaming superglossy, with scintillating color animated in realtime, as do both lights – and all that while you pan, rotate, zoom and tilt!

This multi-touch immediacy is only half of Frax, the other side is the sheer aesthetic appeal of the static high resolution images! Render into your photo library or, via IAP in the Frax Cloud, create up to 50 megapixel posters!

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Frax is full of surprises – from short intro videos to hundreds of help pages. An interface that changes chameleon-like to take on a pleasing average of the screen colors. Tabs retract to leave the picture unobscured while you edit.
'Shuffle' new combinations several times per sec. Hidden Edge sliders adjust things live.
A realtime "universe" map. 'Flow' as a backdrop. 'Hyperzoom' to fly back to the top. Submit to the cloud, tweet or Facebook. 'Text your frax' to a friend and they experience it live in the app! Hundreds of presets…And on and on…

Hours of exploring fractal spaces
and even just all the details in the app itself!

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But make no mistake: this is not a mere little toy.
You are visualizing the nature of Nature…
It is the sheer Beauty of Mathematics.

And it will inspire anyone who has an inclination to look beyond the mere pixels.

We hope you enjoy Frax
Ben Weiss • Kai Krause • Tom Beddard