HyperFractal

Math isn’t just a torture method for your brain while in school. In fact, math is responsible for the well-functioning of most programs, and video games. It can even be used to create art, with fractals representing a cool practice. With applications like HyperFractal, you can witness the beautiful side of math.

First of all, the application skips you the whole time, and effort required to go through a setup process to make it work. This enables you to easily carry it around on a thumb drive, so you can use it on other computer. You just need to make sure that .NET Framework is already on the computer you plan to use it on.

There’s no fractal created by default, so initial loading time is fast. There are different preset formulas at your disposal, but you can’t create your own. However, custom configurations can be saved to file, and this comes in handy because editable parameters are also related to fractal generating engine.

Editing can feel a little frustrating, with expandable properties menus used for all values, including zoom, and rotation, making them rather uncomfortable to configure, especially because of the lack of a preview option before generating the new fractal. What’s more, every change means you need to render the fractal again, with no option to undo, other than manually editing values to the previous form.

Size of the canvas is another thing you need to get your head around. Sadly, related configuration options don’t let you adjust width, and height, but rather the overall resolution. For more variety, several color filter effects can be used. Luckily, color changes on the spot, without rendering the object again.

Since it’s based on really complex operations, your CPU can be put under some pressure. Sure enough, this only depends on view, and render options. When done, a fractal can be saved as a picture, but the only available format is PNG.

In conclusion, HyperFractal is packed with a lot of power under the hood, but some time needs to be invested into accommodation, because of the rather difficult method of managing settings. On the other hand, it’s portable, while generated fractals are in high-quality, can be enhanced with colors, and exported as pictures.