Portable Fractalus

Made as the portable counterpart of Fractalus, this is a tiny software application that features advanced settings for helping you generate true-color high-resolution fractals. It's mostly geared toward experienced users.

As there is no setup pack involved, you can drop the program files in any part of the hard disk and just click the executable to launch Fractalus. Another option is to keep it stored on a USB flash drive, in order to directly run it on any PC with minimum effort and no previous installers. Moreover, it doesn't modify the Windows registry configuration.

The GUI doesn't include particularly attractive graphical elements but it has a neatly organized structure. It's actually based on two windows, one for displaying the fractals and another for navigating the menus.

You can define fractal parameters when it comes to the maximum number of iterations, pot value, picture size, bail out, image format (JPG, BMP, TIF), texture, number of threads, inside color, color by potential, boxed zoom, fractal type (Mandelbrot, Julia), color smoothness, and other aspects.

Fractalus lets you view the fractal coordinates, set up the color palette, find Julia or original Mandelbrot fractals, examine statistics (e.g. precision, color used, inside pixels, Windows version), save the fractal to file (FRA format) and open it later, save the fractal with image to file (FPI format), save only the picture (JPG format), as well as create movies from fractals and play them.

We haven't come across any stability issues in our tests, thanks to the fact that the tool didn't hang, crash or prompt error messages. It left a small footprint on system resources, running on low CPU and RAM.

To sum it up, Fractalus provides you with advanced, yet approachable options for generating and saving fractals. Its interface needs some improvements, though. We must also keep in mind that the app hasn't been updated for a long time.