mandelbrot set viewer
A couple of years ago I had the idea to build a Mandelbrot set fractal viewer in the spirit of Google Maps. Google Maps itself has a method to display your own map data by implementing a "tile" server, but it seems specifically oriented toward geographical data and doesn't have features like arbitrary zoom depth (which you'd clearly want for fractals). I looked around for other similar generic solutions and didn't find anything at the time.
Back then, I implemented a drag-scrollable zoomable fractal viewer in Javascript from first principles. This involved doing all the crufty cross-browser compatibility work myself, which was really annoying and very nearly took all the fun out of the project. Recently, after playing with jQuery a bit, I thought it would be good to go back to the fractal viewer and reimplement it using jQuery.
You can see the results of my efforts at my Mandelbrot set viewer.
The controls are pretty much what you'd expect. Panning and dragging work as expected (but sometimes you have to wait for the tile server to keep up). The zoom control zooms in 2x for each step, with an effective upper bound limited only by the floating point precision of Javascript. Double-clicking zooms in 2x on a particular point on the plane. The currently-unlabeled button below the zoom control allows you to generate a larger (desktop-sized) snapshot of your current view.
I was talking to Phil today who suggested I look at OpenLayers. Sure enough, in their Gallery there is already a Fractal Browser which does almost exactly the work that I've already done!
Once again, somebody out there on the internet has already thought of the same idea. Nevertheless, I'm happy with my viewer (even though it's not everything I had envisioned yet) and I think I'll leave it as is and move along to something else. Finally, because this is Open Source Wednesday, you can find the code in ghewgill/mandelbrot on GitHub. Enjoy!
Back then, I implemented a drag-scrollable zoomable fractal viewer in Javascript from first principles. This involved doing all the crufty cross-browser compatibility work myself, which was really annoying and very nearly took all the fun out of the project. Recently, after playing with jQuery a bit, I thought it would be good to go back to the fractal viewer and reimplement it using jQuery.
You can see the results of my efforts at my Mandelbrot set viewer.
The controls are pretty much what you'd expect. Panning and dragging work as expected (but sometimes you have to wait for the tile server to keep up). The zoom control zooms in 2x for each step, with an effective upper bound limited only by the floating point precision of Javascript. Double-clicking zooms in 2x on a particular point on the plane. The currently-unlabeled button below the zoom control allows you to generate a larger (desktop-sized) snapshot of your current view.
I was talking to Phil today who suggested I look at OpenLayers. Sure enough, in their Gallery there is already a Fractal Browser which does almost exactly the work that I've already done!
Once again, somebody out there on the internet has already thought of the same idea. Nevertheless, I'm happy with my viewer (even though it's not everything I had envisioned yet) and I think I'll leave it as is and move along to something else. Finally, because this is Open Source Wednesday, you can find the code in ghewgill/mandelbrot on GitHub. Enjoy!
I actually had the mouse scroll working in the pre-jQuery version, and found that plugin for jQuery but hadn't set it up yet. It's actually not too useful since the tile server isn't very fast, and it gets behind if you zoom around a lot.
I hesitate to try to render the set locally, since the tile server is currently C++ compiled with -O3 so it's pretty much as fast as it's going to get on the bare metal. Maybe we should have a go with JS just to compare the performance!
I hesitate to try to render the set locally, since the tile server is currently C++ compiled with -O3 so it's pretty much as fast as it's going to get on the bare metal. Maybe we should have a go with JS just to compare the performance!
2009-10-29T07:04:22Z