About

This is a multithreaded fractal viewer written in Java. It is relatively fast: depending on the viewed region, rendering a fractal in 800x800 takes between 100-600ms on 8 threads. Render times on 1 thread are slower.

Features

• Completely asynchronous, multithreaded architecture; the UI always stays responsive
• Incremental panning and zooming in: the last render is scaled while zooming in; while panning, missing regions will be white until filled in by the renderer (asynchronously)
• Saving fractals as an image
• Multiple independent windows
• (Continouos) Zooming, Panning
• Many colormaps to choose from, scraped from matplotlib
  • Palette switching is decoupled from fractal computation, and is instant (10-20ms)
• 3 supported fractals; adding more is relatively simple
  1. Mandelbrot
  2. Julia
  3. Sierpinski Triangle (with code adapted from XaoS)
• Aspect ratio compensation: even when the window is non-square, the fractal won't be squished/stretched

Inputs and Keybindings

• MouseWheelForward -> zoom in, MouseWheelBackward -> zoom out
• Panning means shifting the viewport in whatever direction; this corresponds to moving the fractal in the opposite direction.

Keybinding	Function
Left Click	Zoom in at point
Right Click	Zoom out at point
Ctrl+MouseWheel	Zoom in/out at center continously
Alt+MouseWheel	Zoom in/out at cursor continouosly
Shift+Drag+LMB1	Drag out a rectangle and zoom into it; (to draw a non-square, deselect View->Always Use Square Selection)
Ctrl+Shift+Drag+LMB	Same as above, but always draw a square (stretched to aspect ratio)
(Ctrl)+Shift+Drag+RMB	Create a new window with that area zoomed into
MouseWheelForward	Pan upwards
MouseWheelBackward	Pan downwards
Shift+MouseWheelForward	Pan left
Shit+MouseWheelBackward	Pan right

Technologies used

• Java 8
• Swing for GUI
• maven for building
• junit for some tests

Footnotes

1. LMB/RMB refer to the button released at the end of the operation. ↩