XaoS Real-Time Fractal Zoomer for Mac OS X, Version 3.4

Originally written by Jan Hubicka and Thomas Marsh
Currently maintained by Zoltan Kovacs (kovzol@math.u-szeged.hu)
Ported to Mac OS X By J.B. Langston III (jb-langston@austin.rr.com)
 
Current version: 
XaoS Homepage: http://xaos.sf.net/
 
About
XaoS is an incredible program that lets you explore fractals by zooming in and out in real time.  If you’ve only used static fractal viewers like Fractint or UltraFractal before, zooming into a fractal as a real time animation is incredible.  XaoS was originally written by Jan Hubicka and Thomas Marsh, and is currently maintained by Zoltan Kovacs.  I contributed the Mac OS X user interface and made binaries available for ease of use. XaoS is free software available under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Installation and Usage
After downloading the XaoS binary, just copy it to your applications folder and run the program. Basic usage is really pretty simple. 
	•	Point your mouse at the part of the image you want to zoom in on, and hold down the mouse button.  Away you go! 
	•	To zoom back out, hold down the control key and click.  Or, right click with a two-button mouse. 
	•	To pan, hold down the shift key and drag. On a three-button mouse, drag with the center button.  If you have a mouse with a scroll wheel, pressing down on the scroll wheel usually works like the center button.
	•	To go full-screen, select UI->Drivers->Mac OS X Fullscreen Driver from the menu.  In full screen mode, the menu is only displayed when you move the mouse near the top of the screen. After going full screen, you can quit by pressing ⌘Q, or you can go back to windowed mode by selecting UI->Drivers->Mac OS X Windowed Driver.
 
To learn more, check out the tutorials from the Help menu.  They are really informative and a lot of fun to watch.  For more in-depth information, use the online help.
 
Known Issues
The following are known issues with the current version of XaoS for Mac OS X.
	•	Catseye fractal does not render properly.   Workaround: Set the bailout to just over 4 (e.g., 4.000000001). After changing this setting, the fractal renders as expected.

Revision History
3.4
Release Date: 6/1/2008

This is a huge release for Mac users. The Mac user interface has been completely rewritten in Cocoa and improved in a number of ways:

	•	Standard Aqua dialog boxes instead of the strange-looking Unixy things in previous versions. Fields in dialog boxes now support cut and paste as you would expect.
	•	Pop-up menus are now displayed using standard Aqua menus
	•	Menu bar in full-screen mode is now the standard Mac OS X menu bar. It automatically slides into view when you move your mouse to the top of the screen and slides out when you move away from it.
	•	XaoS now has a standard Aqua about dialog box, which displays links to license and credits in help file.
	•	Help is now displayed via Mac OS X's standard help viewer. Tutorials can still be launched via links in  the help viewer.
	•	Support for opening xpf (Saved Position) and xaf (Saved Animation) files directly from Finder via drag and drop and by double-clicking.  XaoS now includes its own document icon for these files as well.
	•	Support for basic AppleScriptability via the standard script dictionary. Includes things like opening files and manipulating the window, but no XaoS-specific functionality.
	•	Support for panning the fractal with the mouse scroll wheel or trackpad two-finger gestures.

In addition to the user interface improvements, XaoS for Mac has the following improvements:

	•	Now uses greater precision (long double) for calculations to enable much deeper zooms.
	•	In addition to English, XaoS for Mac OS X now supports the following languages: Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Romanian, and Spanish.
	•	Integration with Stone Design's Videator (http://stone.com/Videator/). XaoS can now send live a live video stream to Videator, which can then do post-processing using Mac OS X's core video technology. This is great for VJing (live video performance art). See http://stone.com/Videator/VJ.html for more details.
	•	New Italian translation courtesy of Sergio Zanchetta
	•	Updated German translation by Andreas Madritsch
	•	Bug fix to prevent Edge Detection and Pseudo 3D filter from rendering the image completely black.
	•	Bug fix to prevent garbled characters when using non-English languages on modern systems using UTF-8
	•	Bug fix to prevent XaoS from crashing after using the Render Animation functionality
	•	Bug fix to prevent incorrect colors on smooth coloring modes with certain video modes

3.3
Release Date: 3/13/2008

Changes since 3.2.2:
	•	Added user formula support using SFFE/GSL library.
	•	Fixed bug where colors display incorrectly on Intel Macs after switching from full screen back to windowed driver.
	•	Upgraded libpng to 1.2.25.
	•	Included libgsl 1.10.
	•	Updated build instructions with easier third party library build process.
	•	Added performance mode, which inhibits text display (useful for VJing).
	•	Fixed bug where color cycling would stop when moving from forward cycling to reverse.

3.2.2 
Release Date: 9/26/2006

Changes since Beta 4:
	•	Fixed bug which was preventing XaoS from rendering images over 2500x2500
	•	Added fullscreen driver
	•	Upgraded libpng to 1.2.12

3.2.1 Beta 4
Release Date: 7/8/2006
	
Changes since Beta 3:
	•	Fixed bug with colors on Intel Macs (default colors previously showed yellow instead of blue)
	•	Fixed bug that prevented render animation option from working correctly
	•	Added -windowsize and -autoscreensize command line arguments
	-windowsize allows you to specify the window size on the command line
	-autoscreensize causes XaoS to attempt to automatically detect the pysical screen size

3.2.1 Beta 3
Release Date: 6/27/2006

Changes since Beta 2:
	•	Support saving to png. libpng is included as a private framework.
	•	Changed icon to match XaoS default image
	•	Provide standard Mac OS keyboard shortcuts for applicable functions -- redo, undo, save, load
	•	Repackaged as a disk image with Readme fil

3.2.1 Beta 2
Release Date: 6/20/2006

Changes since Beta 1:
	•	Keyboard input has been implemented for all keys supported by XaoS.
	•	Fixed bug where window events were not handled if driver was reinitialized.
	•	Tutorials now play back.
	•	Random examples now load.
	•	Since Mac OS X doesn't allow single menu items directly in the menubar, I put "Stop Replay" for animation mode in the UI menu
	•	Mac OS X applications have their own quit command in the Application menu.  So I removed the quit menu and preceeding separator from the file menu.
	•	Swapped order of UI and Help menus in animation mode to comply with Human Interface Guidelines.
 
3.2.1 Beta 1
Release Date: 6/15/2006
 
This was the original public release of XaoS for Mac OS X.

Included Software

libpng 1.2.25
http://libpng.org/pub/png/libpng.html

GNU Scientific Library 1.10 
http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/

About Free Software
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; it is displayable from the program's online help feature.  If not, you can find it on the Internet at http://www.gnu.org or you can write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.